''Crise é 30 vezes maior que a de 1998"

O presidente Lula afirmou ontem, em Campo Grande (MS), onde deu início a obras do PAC nas áreas de saneamento e urbanização de favelas, que a crise bancária dos Estados Unidos não afetou o "querido Brasil". Eufórico, ele falou de uma economia fortalecida no País.

"Em 1998 teve uma crise na Malásia e o Brasil quase quebra. Agora tem uma crise certamente 30 vezes mais forte que a da Malásia, uma crise na maior economia do mundo, que são os Estados Unidos. Eles já estão pensando que essa dívida vai ficar em mais de US$ 1 trilhão e que o Estado vai ter que ajudar a resolver porque parte do sistema financeiro está quebrando e até agora não aconteceu nada com o nosso querido Basil."

"Em 2003 - prosseguiu Lula -, quando tomei posse, o Brasil tinha US$ 30 bilhões de reserva, dos quais US$ 16 bilhões eram do FMI. Então, a gente tinha US$ 14 bilhões na verdade. Devolvemos para o FMI os US$ 16 bilhões deles, pagamos o Clube de Paris e temos hoje quase US$ 200 bilhões em reservas."

Lula afirmou que hoje o Brasil "tem mais dinheiro do que (o valor) da dívida". Ele ironizou seus críticos. "E tem gente que fala que isso é sorte do presidente. Ora, a sorte vem para quem trabalha. A sorte depende de decisões políticas, é coragem, é compromisso. O Brasil estava desacostumado a crescer. Foram 26 anos de atrofiamento. Mas agora aprendemos. E não tem volta porque nossa política econômica foi baseada na seriedade e não com mágica."

O Brasil vive "momento mágico, momento excepcional", na avaliação do presidente. Para ilustrar seu pronunciamento, Lula apontou para o FMI e para o milagre econômico no regime militar. "Passei 30 anos da minha vida gritando fora FMI. Hoje não tem uma única faixa falando isso porque ele (o Fundo) foi para fora porque cumprimos com as nossas obrigações."

(texto completo em estadao.com.br)

falando em crise...

Fonte: The New York Times

Crise nos EUA
Fed mina confiança do mercado ao salvar o Bear Stearns

Gretchen Morgenson

Quais são as conseqüências de um mundo no qual as autoridades regulatórias resgatam até mesmo as instituições financeiras cuja irresponsabilidade e cobiça ajudaram a criar o imenso atoleiro em que o crédito dos Estados Unidos se transformou? As conseqüências serão um dólar ainda mais fraco, inflação descontrolada, uma continuação da lenta hemorragia que testemunhamos de parte dos bancos e corretoras ao longo dos últimos 12 meses?

Ou todas as anteriores?

Fiquem atentos, porque em breve descobriremos. E a cena não será bonita.

Ao concordar em garantir uma linha de crédito que permitiu que o JPMorgan tomasse o controle do Bear Stearns, o Federal Reserve (Fed, o banco central dos Estados Unidos) reconheceu que nenhuma empresa de grande porte e detentora de uma carteira considerável de títulos hipotecários ou empréstimos feitos a instituições emissoras de hipotecas poderia ser autorizada a falir, nas atuais condições. Foi o mais explícito sinal já observado da doutrina de resgate do banco central, que já havia ajudado a forçar um casamento entre o Bank of America e a Countrywide.

Mas por que salvar o Bear Stearns? O beneficiário do resgate, é bom lembrar, muitas vezes operou nas áreas cinzentas de Wall Street, e com uma abordagem dura, agressiva. Até que as autoridades regulatórias interviessem, em 1996, o banco não hesitava em oferecer cobertura a corretoras de práticas dúbias como a Stratton Oakmont e a A. R. Baron, cuidando da liquidação de transações de ações duvidosas.

E como um dos maiores envolvidos no ramo de títulos hipotecários em Wall Street, o Bear Stearns ofereceu generosas linhas de crédito a instituições de crédito imobiliário de risco (subprime) beneméritas como a New Century (agora falida). O banco também controla a EMC Mortgage Servicing, uma das empresas mais agressivas nesse mercado.

O índice de inadimplência registrado pelo Bear Stearns nas chamadas hipotecas Alt-A que a instituição subscreveu indica, igualmente, que suas práticas de empréstimos eram frouxas, especialmente ao longo do boom do crédito imobiliário. Até fevereiro, de acordo com dados da Bloomberg, 15% do valor total dos empréstimos representados por títulos emitidos com a ajuda da empresa registravam atraso de pagamento de mais de 60 dias ou tinham suas hipotecas em execução, ante uma média setorial de 8,4%.

Não nos esqueçamos de que o Bear Stearns perdeu bilhões de dinheiro de seus clientes na metade do ano passado, quando dois fundos de hedge (cobertura) que investiam pesadamente em títulos hipotecários entraram em colapso. E a empresa tentou lançar ao mercado os títulos hipotecários tóxicos que retinha em carteira, por meio da oferta pública inicial de um novo grupo financeiro chamado Everquest Financial, no ano passado. Afortunadamente, a transação nunca foi concretizada.

Seria conveniente recordar, igualmente, que, em 1998, quando o fundo de hedge Long Term Capital Management teve de ser resgatado em uma operação coordenada pelo Fed, o Bear Stearns se recusou a participar da operação. Jimmy Cayne, então presidente-executivo do grupo, mandou o Fed passear.

E assim, o Bear Stearns, uma empresa que muitos vêem como a versão 2000 da Drexel Burnham Lambert, a corretora de junk bonds (papéis lixo) dominada por Michael Milken nos anos 80, será resgatado. Quase duas décadas atrás, as autoridades deixaram que a Drexel morresse.

As duas empresas têm muito em comum. Mas a diferença entre seus destinos oferece prova de que vivemos em uma época muito diferente, e muito mais assustadora, do que a década de 80.

"Por que não transformar o Bear Stearns, banco que sempre foi agressivamente competitivo, sempre impiedoso, em um exemplo?", perguntou William Fleckenstein, da Fleckenstein Capital. "Seria o momento perfeito para criar um exemplo, mas não agimos mais assim. Agora somos o país do resgate".

E somos mesmo. Porque não permitimos que qualquer de nossas instituições financeiras falisse, por anos e anos, elas se tornaram tão imensas que agora não se pode mais permitir que qualquer uma delas naufrague, porque isso poderia causar um tsunami que varreria fundos de hedge, bancos e as demais corretoras que se mantém à tona.

Caso o Bear Stearns falisse, por exemplo, o resultado seria um despejo generalizado de títulos hipotecários e outros ativos em um mercado congelado e do qual os compradores estão se escondendo. Essa liquidação generalizada forçaria as instituições sobreviventes, cujas carteiras contivessem papéis semelhantes, a reduzir o valor contábil de suas posições, o que geraria novos pedidos de cobertura de margem e novas falências.

Até 30 de novembro, o Bear Stearns detinha em suas contas cerca de US$ 46 bilhões em títulos hipotecários, títulos lastreados por hipotecas e títulos lastreados por ativos. Despejar essa carteira em um mercado hipotecário que, na prática, não está operando seria, evidentemente, um desastre.

A parte mais triste do processo é o fato de que os investidores, que já desconfiam seriamente dos líderes governamentais e corporativos, mais uma vez foram informados de que nada havia de errado - e até o último minuto. Assim, admira que os investidores reajam a cada boato de falência iminente no mercado como se fosse totalmente verdadeiro?

O dilema do Fed é que, como o menino que tampou o buraco no dique com o dedo para impedir que o mar devastasse a região, novos buracos continuam a surgir.

As autoridades regulatórias devem fazer o que puderem para manter os mercados abertos e em operação. E isso, em larga medida, depende da confiança dos investidores. Mas, ao oferecer amparo a empresas como o Bear Stearns, que são as verdadeiras responsáveis pelos problemas que as estão destruindo e pelos problemas do mercado, as autoridades de fiscalização como o Fed, na verdade, destroem essa confiança um pouquinho mais.

O Lulla só fala bobagem. É incrível!!! Não vou nem perder meu tempo...

Quanto ao FED, se por um lado isso cria sim moral hazard - faça o que quiser que, no final o FED salva, por outro não é tão "salvamento" assim:

a) os gestores perderam sua grana;
b) o Bear foi vendido por 2 USD/share. Quando estava a 30,00, na sexta passada, só o prédio onde estava equivalia a 2/3 do seu market value!!! Imagina a 2. Perderam o Banco na bacia das almas.
c) não foi feito nada fora da lei. o que se usou foi o redesconto bancário, que existe pra isso mesmo. é verdade que "à brasileira", ie, através do JP Morgan, que é um banco múltiplo, pois um investment bank não tem acesso ao redesconto.

Eu penso que o FED não deveria nem existir. Se existe, uma de suas missões é conter crises sistêmicas.

mends wrote:O Lulla só fala bobagem. É incrível!!! Não vou nem perder meu tempo...

Ah... perde um minuto, vai.


Tentei fazer você me dizer, pelo MSN, quais as maiores crises desde o início do século XX. Você respondeu 1907, 1929, 1974, 1987, 1998, e agora. Mas pra não complicar muito o papo, reduzo pra: como a crise atual afeta nóis?

nóis quem? nóis saideros ou nóis Banânia.

dólar em queda é bom pro wagnão, que vai ter uma dívida menor quando sair do MBA...

a crise é doença de rico. o brasil não tem sofisticação financeira para sentir os efeitos da crise, duvido que alguma insituição brasileira de "varejo" seja contraparte em algum derivativo desses. como tb não somos um país eminentemente exportador, mesmo se o "tema" das commodities vier abaixo, não sei se sofremos tanto. em compensação, com a percepção de risco aumentando, os negócios não saem - como por exemplo os bids da cesp, que não devem ter muitos estrangeiros.

em suma, não sei. com o bear como o LTCM da vez (o fundo "símbolo" da crise de 98), penso que essa "crise" já empatou com a de 98.

The financial system

What went wrong

Mar 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition

In our special briefing, we look at how near Wall Street came to systemic collapse this week—and how the financial system will change as a result. We start with how financiers—and their critics—have laboured under a delusion

“A COMPANY for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.” This lure for the South Sea Company, published in 1720, has a whiff of the 21st century about it. Modern finance has promised miracles, seduced the brilliant and the greedy—and wrought destruction. Alan Greenspan, formerly chairman of the Federal Reserve, said in 2005 that “increasingly complex financial instruments have contributed to the development of a far more flexible, efficient, and hence resilient financial system than the one that existed just a quarter-century ago.” Tell that to Bear Stearns, Wall Street's fifth-largest investment bank, the most spectacular corporate casualty so far of the credit crisis.

For the critics of modern finance, Bear's swift end on March 16th was the inevitable consequence of the laissez-faire philosophy that allowed financial services to innovate and spread almost unchecked. This has created a complex, interdependent system prone to conflicts of interest. Fraud has been rampant in the sale of subprime mortgages. Spurred by pay that was geared to short-term gains, bankers and fund managers stand accused of pocketing bonuses with no thought for the longer-term consequences of what they were doing. Their gambling has been fed by the knowledge that, if disaster struck, someone else—borrowers, investors, taxpayers—would end up bearing at least some of the losses.

Since the era of frock coats and buckled shoes, finance has been knocked back by booms and busts every ten years or so. But the past decade has been plagued by them. It has been pocked by the Asian crisis, the debacle at Long-Term Capital Management, a super-brainy hedge fund, the dotcom crash and now what you might call the first crisis of securitisation. If the critics are right and something in finance is broken, then there will be pressure to reregulate, to return to what Alistair Darling, Britain's chancellor of the exchequer, calls “good old-fashioned banking”. But are the critics right? What really went wrong with finance? And how can it be fixed?

Happy days

The seeds of today's disaster were sown in the 1980s, when financial services began a pattern of growth that may only now have come to an end. In a recent study Martin Barnes of BCA Research, a Canadian economic-research firm, traces the rise of the American financial-services industry's share of total corporate profits, from 10% in the early 1980s to 40% at its peak last year (see chart 1). Its share of stockmarket value grew from 6% to 19%. These proportions look all the more striking—even unsustainable—when you note that financial services account for only 15% of corporate America's gross value added and a mere 5% of private-sector jobs.

At first this growth was built on the solid foundations of rising asset prices. The 18 years to 2000 witnessed an unparalleled bull market for shares and bonds. As the world's central banks tamed inflation, interest rates fell and asset prices rose (see chart 2). Corporate restructuring, wage competition and a revolution in information technology boosted profits. A typical portfolio of shares, bonds and cash gave real annual yields of over 14%, calculates Mr Barnes, almost four times the norm of earlier decades. Financial-service firms made hay. The number of equity mutual funds in America rose more than fourfold.


But something changed in 2001, when the dotcom bubble burst. America's GDP growth since then has been weaker than in any cycle since the 1950s, barring the double-dip recovery in 1980-81. Stephen King and Ian Morris of HSBC point out that growth in consumer spending, total investment and exports in this cycle has been correspondingly feeble.

Yet, like Wile E. Coyote running over the edge of a cliff, financial services kept on going. A service industry that, in effect, exists to help people write, trade and manage financial claims on future cashflows raced ahead of the real economy, even as the ground beneath it fell away.

The industry has defied gravity by using debt, securitisation and proprietary trading to boost fee income and profits. Investors hungry for yield have willingly gone along. Since 2000, according to BCA, the value of assets held in hedge funds, with their high fees and higher leverage, has quintupled. In addition, the industry has combined computing power and leverage to create a burst of innovation. The value of outstanding credit-default swaps, for instance, has climbed to a staggering $45 trillion. In 1980 financial-sector debt was only a tenth of the size of non-financial debt. Now it is half as big.

This process has turned investment banks into debt machines that trade heavily on their own accounts. Goldman Sachs is using about $40 billion of equity as the foundation for $1.1 trillion of assets. At Merrill Lynch, the most leveraged, $1 trillion of assets is teetering on around $30 billion of equity. In rising markets, gearing like that creates stellar returns on equity. When markets are in peril, a small fall in asset values can wipe shareholders out.

The banks' course was made possible by cheap money, facilitated in turn by low consumer-price inflation. In more regulated times, credit controls or the gold standard restricted the creation of credit. But recently central banks have in effect conspired with the banks' urge to earn fees and use leverage. The resulting glut of liquidity and financial firms' thirst for yield led eventually to the ill-starred boom in American subprime mortgages.

The dance of debt

The tendency for financial services to run right over the cliff is accentuated by financial assets' habit of growing during booms. By lodging their extra assets as collateral, the intermediaries can put them to work and borrow more. Tobias Adrian, of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Hyun Song Shin, of Princeton University, have shown that since the 1970s, debts have grown faster than assets during booms. This pro-cyclical leverage can feed on itself. If financial groups use the borrowed money to buy more of the sorts of securities they lodged as collateral, then the prices of those securities will go up. That, in turn, enables them to raise more debt and buy more securities.

Indeed, their shareholders would punish them if they sat out the next round—as Chuck Prince let slip only weeks before the crisis struck, when he said that Citigroup, the bank he then headed, was “still dancing”. Mr Prince has been ridiculed for his lack of foresight. In fact, he was guilty of blurting out finance's embarrassing secret: that he was trapped in a dance he could not quit. As, in fact, was everyone else.

Sooner or later, though, the music stops. And when it does, the very mechanisms that create abundant credit will also destroy it. Most things attract buyers when the price falls. But not necessarily securities. Because financial intermediaries need to limit their leverage in a falling market, they sell assets (again, the system is pro-cyclical). That lowers the prices of securities, which puts further strain on balance sheets leading to further sales. And so the screw turns until those without leverage will buy.

You do not need bankers to be poorly monitored or over-incentivised for such cycles to work: finance knew booms and manias long before deposit insurance, bank rescues or bonuses. And, human nature being what it is, Jérôme Kerviel, who lost Société Générale a fortune, and the staff of various loss-making, state-owned, German Landesbanks did not need huge pay to lose huge sums. The desire to show that you are a match for the star trader next door, or the bank in the next town, will do.

Yet pay—or at least bad management—probably made this crisis worse. Trades determine bonuses at the end of the year, even though their real value may not become clear until later. Earlier this month a group of financial supervisors reported how managers at the banks worst hit by the crisis had failed to oversee traders or take a broad view of risk across their firms. Perhaps, with proper incentives, managers would have done better.

Alan Johnson, a consultant who designs pay packages for Wall Street, predicts that in future senior executives will face the prospect of some of their bonuses being contingent on the bank's performance over several years. Yet to the extent that many senior bankers are paid in shares they cannot immediately sell, they already are. And to the extent that Bear Stearns's employees owned one-third of the firm, they already looked to the longer term.

If altering pay cannot stop manias, can regulation? The criticism that this crisis is the product of the deregulation of finance misses an important point. The worst excesses in the securitisation mess are encrusted precisely where regulation sought to protect banks and investors from the dangers of untrammelled credit growth. That is because regulations offer not just protection, but also clever ways to make money by getting around them.

Existing rules on capital adequacy require banks to put some capital aside for each asset. If the market leads to losses, the chances are they will have enough capital to cope. Yet this rule sets up a perverse incentive to create structures free of the capital burden—such as credits that last 364 days, and hence do not count as “permanent”. The hundreds of billions of dollars in the shadow banking system—the notorious SIVs and conduits that have caused the banks so much pain—have been warehoused there to get round the rules. Spain's banking regulator prudently said that such vehicles could be created, but only if the banks put capital aside. So far the country has escaped the damage seen elsewhere. When reformed capital-adequacy rules are introduced, this is an area that will need to be monitored rigorously.

It is the same with rating agencies, the whipping boys of the crisis. Most bonds used to be issued by companies, and to judge something AAA was straightforward. Perhaps back then it made sense for some investors, such as pension funds, to be obliged to buy top-rated bonds. But this rule created a boundary between AAA and other bonds that was ripe for gaming. Clever people, abetted by the rating agencies, set out to pass off poor credit as AAA, because they stood to make a lot of money. And they did. For a while.

The financial industry is likely to stagnate or shrink in the next few years. That is partly because the last phase of its growth was founded on unsustainable leverage, and partly because the value of the underlying equities and bonds is unlikely to grow as it did in the 1980s and 1990s. If finance is foolishly reregulated, it will fare even worse.

And what of all the clever and misused wizardry of modern finance? Mr Greenspan was half right. Financial engineering can indeed spread risk and help the system work better. Like junk bonds, reviled at the end of 1980s, securitisation will rebound, tamed and better understood—and smaller. That is financial progress. It is a pity that it comes at such a cost.

Buttonwood

Apocalypse now?

Mar 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Investment havens in a time of panic

IF THE world is going to hell in a handcart, what should you buy? With newspaper headlines dominated by the credit crisis, and with big banking names perceived to be under threat, this is a question all investors need to consider.

Much depends on what form you expect the apocalypse to take. In recent weeks investors have been flocking to buy Treasury bonds, relying on the unimpeachable credit of the American government. But with the dollar falling almost every day, foreign investors may feel the government's credit is about as unimpeachable as Richard Nixon; they will be paid back only in devalued paper. And if, as some observers believe, the Federal Reserve has taken its eye off inflation in its zeal to rescue the financial sector, domestic investors may not find ten-year Treasury-bond yields of just 3.4% (on March 18th) all that appealing.

Perhaps index-linked Treasury bonds would be a better safeguard? After all, they provide protection against inflation. The problem is that other people have already thought of that. Earlier this month, the real yield on America's five-year issue was briefly negative; investors were willing to see their investments not quite keep pace with prices. That does not make them look great value.

Then there is cash. Fortunes have been made by being a cash buyer at the end of a bear market. But where to keep the money? Given the nervousness about banks, many savers will want to keep their holdings below the ceiling for deposit insurance (in America, $100,000 per saver per bank). The past few months have also thrown up doubts about money-market funds, some of which have taken a bit too much risk in the search for higher yields. So far, the fund-management firms have stood behind these funds. Come the real apocalypse, would they be able to do so?

In any case, it is not just a matter of choosing cash; investors must choose a currency too. Chris Watling of Longview Economics suggests they should aim for countries that have demonstrated control of their money supply and have current-account surpluses; that points to the Japanese yen and Swiss franc, both of which have been gaining against the dollar in recent weeks.

The Swiss franc certainly did well in the 1970s, an era that strategists are frequently citing as the model for recent events. At one point, the Swiss were even able to charge investors for the privilege of holding accounts in their currency—a rare instance of negative interest rates.

Gold is another possibility, because it is seen as a hedge against both inflation and the breakdown of the financial system. But as Buttonwood noted two weeks ago (see article), gold can itself be the subject of speculative excess, as it was in 1980: any asset that takes 28 years to reclaim its peak is hardly a reliable store of value. The same is true of other commodities. It was significant that raw-material prices were battered on March 17th, when risk aversion was at its height. Hedge funds may well have been selling their commodity positions to meet demands for cash from other parts of their portfolios.

In a complete meltdown, for example during world wars and revolutions, it is hard to find anything that keeps its value. Stockmarkets collapse. Governments default on their debt. Private property is no longer respected, either because governments seize the assets or because goods cannot be protected from criminals. Jewellery might hold its worth, but you had better have a good hiding-place. Think of all the treasures looted by the Nazis or the Red Army.

In his book “Wealth, War and Wisdom”, Barton Biggs, a Wall Street veteran, suggests that investors should own, as insurance against the apocalypse, “a farm or a ranch somewhere far off the beaten track but which you can get to quickly and easily.” A sheep farm in New Zealand would not really qualify, unless you already live in Wellington. And even land can be grabbed by governments, as has happened recently in Zimbabwe.

But, even on the assumption that war and civil disorder are avoided, Mr Biggs's advice still has some merit. After all, farmland, after many years in the doldrums, is suddenly fashionable again, thanks to revitalised agricultural prices. Those prices may be due for a retreat in the short term, but competition from biofuels and increased demand from Asia may nevertheless mean that the era of cheap food is over. British farmland prices rose by 25% last year, according to Knight Frank, an estate agent. It would be a nice irony if the best hedge against a collapse of the post-industrial economy turned out to be a return to the agrarian past.

Economics focus

History lesson

Mar 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition

How to deal with banking crises

THE decline and fall of Bear Stearns illustrates both an old truth and a new one. The old truth is that when cash is scarce, he who has deep pockets is king. Bear Stearns is still standing only because JPMorgan Chase was solid enough to prop it up. The new truth lies in the Federal Reserve's role as matchmaker of last resort, smoothing the deal with a temporary loan of $30 billion. This shows just how far a financial supervisor's purview now extends. Even though Bear is not a fully regulated institution, the investment bank was deemed too central to the complex web of America's financial system to be allowed to fail.

Private-sector solutions to banking crises, in which strong institutions buy the weak, demand well-heeled banks. Just now, these are in short supply. Few institutions have been left unscathed by bad mortgage debts; JPMorgan Chase is a rare exception. When banks are threatened with insolvency, it is often the government—with the deepest pockets of all—that has to make good their losses. But how much might the state have to stump up? And how should it go about it? As today's credit crisis widens, commentators are turning to history as a guide.

One lesson is that trouble is all too common. Most members of the IMF have undergone at least some distress since the late 1970s. Crises in poorer countries tend to be deeper and more costly, often because they are twinned with collapsing currencies. According to a 1996 survey of insolvencies by economists at the World Bank, the bail-out of Argentina's banking system in the early 1980s cost a stunning 55% of GDP to fix.

The rich world's banking troubles have not been cheap either. The bill for bolstering Finland's banks in the early 1990s came to 8% of GDP; Sweden's bail-out was scarcely less dear. America spent more than 3% of GDP cleaning up the savings-and-loan crisis, its priciest to date. That suggests that the possible cost of today's troubles, though alarming, is not off the charts. The best, though still highly uncertain, estimate of prospective lending losses is around $1.1 billion, less than half of which would be borne in America by banks, investors and in forgone taxes: $460 billion is equivalent to about 3% of last year's GDP.

Ideally, fiscal support for banks should be targeted, if it is needed at all. Bail-outs are often limited to just one institution. Continental Illinois in America and Johnson Matthey Bankers in Britain were rescued in 1984, because regulators judged that the banks were large enough to rock the whole system should they go bust. When Barings, another British bank, was wiped out by trading losses 11 years later, regulators let it fail, judging that the risk of wider damage was low.

These episodes occurred in times of relative financial calm, so have few lessons for today. The parallels with the Nordic crises of the early 1990s look more useful. Then as now, the banking bust followed economic and asset-price booms fired by the deregulation of credit, low interest rates and lax supervision. Norway's three biggest lenders were nationalised, but research by its central bank puts the fiscal cost at far less than in Finland or Sweden. Once banks were taken into public ownership, shareholders were universally wiped out. And though the cost of working out bad debts was around 2% of GDP, all that and more was recouped when the banks were privatised. In other words, the state made a profit from the crisis. Denmark, meanwhile, avoided the storms altogether because of stricter capital rules—prevention is better than cure.

The Nordic crises were not so long ago, yet they seem a world away. Norway probably avoided a worse fate by acting swiftly once it was clear that its biggest banks were insolvent. The obvious contrast is with Japan, where bad debts were left to fester. But today it is much harder for regulators to tell which banks, if any, are insolvent. That is because bad debt is hidden within complex securities, and the value of those securities is almost impossible to measure when markets have dried up. These days, the trouble lies as much in the financial markets as with the banks that trade in them.

1998 and all that

The growing complexity of links between banks is the reason why Bear Stearns, an investment bank that may not have worried regulators had it failed 15 years ago, could not be left to collapse today. The manner of its rescue recalled the efforts to shore up Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund tied intricately into the financial system, in 1998. Bear's demise also shows how the boundary between illiquidity and insolvency is fast dissolving. The bank was sold for a fraction of its book value after it was shut out of lending markets. Yet it is not clear whether it was insolvent in the sense that its assets were worth less than it owed.

By throwing open its discount window to investment banks, the Fed has tacitly admitted that the old rules no longer apply. It was a bold step, but not necessarily a sufficient one. There is still a stigma attached to discount-window borrowing, which means banks may be unwilling to avail themselves of it until it is too late, even when they are truly desperate.

In today's unholy tangle of short-term funding and long-term derivatives contracts, more banks may well fall into the liquidity traps that snared Bear and Britain's Northern Rock. If so, central banks may find they have to go further than ever and provide a floor for asset prices in illiquid markets. Since banks are unwilling to trade in mortgage assets, because they do not have the capital or cannot risk marking losses to market, there may be an opportunity for governments to buy assets at big discounts. Judicious intervention could in principle improve liquidity, bolster confidence and may in the end even make money for taxpayers if asset prices recover. But supporting badly run investment banks should also come with strings attached: regulatory control to reduce the chance that public support will be needed again.

Vixe... vc postou textos tão longos da Economist que até os anúncios do Google ficaram em inglês nessa página.
Anyway, porque dessa vez a crise é pra rico e a(s) outra(s) não era(m)? E porque o Bear Stearns tem logo Bear no nome?

putz, essa pergunta vai me fazer ter que explicar cada uma das crises...

1907 foi restrita aos EUA

1929 foi uma crise classica, com reflexos na economia real

1974 foi a recessão do choque do petroleo, o mundo inteiro sofreu.

1981 foi o flight to quality para os eua, causando a crise da dívida externa dos países do então 3o. Mundo.

1987 foi um 1929 mais fraquinho

1997 foi uma crise desencadeada pelas posições em moedas e títulos soberanos dos emergentes.

Hoje, os instrumentos que estão causando as incertezas de contraparte são extremamente sofisticados, e o Brasil deve ter muito pouco deles em carteira, uma tesouraria ou outra e olhe lá.

Unanswered Questions About Bear's Death
By SCOTT PATTERSON
March 21, 2008

The drama that has gripped financial markets the past few days wouldn't be complete without a cliffhanger. The one consuming Wall Street these days is this: What killed Bear Stearns?


The investment bank's collapse might look easily explained: Its lenders fled as rumors swirled that Bear was running short on cash, an old-fashioned bank run.

But the rumors and the cash crunch lead to a chicken-and-egg conundrum: Which came first, the cash crunch, or rumors of the cash crunch? Were the rumors the result of the normal sort of panic that plagues Wall Street, or something more malicious?

Wall Street analysts, as usual, were caught off guard. Buckingham Research analysts argued in a March 11 report that concerns about Bear's access to cash were "overdone." Lehman Brothers reiterated its $110 price target for Bear on March 13, three days before Bear got sold for $2 a share to J.P. Morgan Chase.

Analysts aside, there were plenty of people in the market who saw something very bad coming. Securities regulators are looking at suspicious trades in stock-options contracts.

On March 10, traders purchased roughly 30,000 "put" options that would pay off if Bear's stock, then trading in the mid-$60s, fell to $35 by March 20, according to Universa Investments, a Santa Monica, Calif., hedge fund that specializes in exotic options-trading strategies. Another 20,000 or so put options that would pay off if Bear's stock fell to $25 by March 20 were purchased on March 13.

In effect, the contracts only hit the jackpot if Bear suffered an extreme event, quickly. "These were incredibly unusual orders," says Mark Spitznagel, Universa's manager.

Of course, there's another explanation in this mystery: Bear dug its own hole. Like all of the investment banks, Bear was heavily leveraged. Its assets were 33 times greater than its equity capital, meaning it depended heavily on borrowed money to invest.

It was about as leveraged as Carlyle Capital, the mortgage fund that was pushed to the brink last week. When you depend that heavily on debt, there's very little margin for error.

Reality Check: Profit Expectations Too High

Even if you think the credit market's and economy's problems have been totally solved, you might find the following predictions tough to swallow:

Financial-sector earnings will be up 315% in the fourth quarter of this year from last year and 27% for all of 2008.

Overall, companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index will enjoy earnings growth of 74% year over year in the fourth quarter and 17% for 2008, the biggest gain since 2004.

Anyone with a toe in reality should be skeptical of such numbers, which are the forecasts among Wall Street analysts, according to data compiled by S&P.

Analysts have been downgrading their earnings expectations. But they're not done, especially if the economy is in recession. Earnings fell 31% in 2001, the year of the most recent recession, according to S&P. They fell 7% and 15%, respectively, in 1990 and 1991, the prior recession. They fell an estimated 6% in 2007, when the economy was apparently not in recession. It's hard to see how they'll rebound dramatically in a year that could include a recession.

--Mark Gongloff

How Bear aided its own demise
By John Gapper

Published: March 19 2008 18:33 | Last updated: March 19 2008 18:33


When the going gets tough, the tough get going. That is the cliché about surviving crises. It is not: When the going gets tough, the tough go to Detroit to play bridge.

But a bridge tournament in Detroit was where Jimmy Cayne, chairman of Bear Stearns, chose to be at the end of last week as his investment bank became embroiled in a solvency crisis. By the time he returned to New York to lend a hand in person, the rest of Wall Street had pulled the plug and the Federal Reserve had been forced to provide emergency funding to Bear through JPMorgan Chase.

Mr Cayne’s response to last week’s crisis, which culminated in JPMorgan taking over Bear for $2 a share and wiping out a lot of his wealth, was a fitting end to a year during which Bear executives tried insouciantly to shrug off the doubts of investors and other banks about their business. The end result was humiliation and ruin for Bear’s 14,000 employees.

It is tempting to think that Bear was simply a victim of circumstance. On that view, one of Wall Street’s biggest investment banks was unwittingly caught up in the worst financial turmoil for decades and suffered a flight by hedge funds and lenders in the bond repo market. It was a perfectly solvent business that was engulfed in the credit crisis like Northern Rock before it.

This was the conclusion drawn by Stephen Raphael, a former Bear board member. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, which also disclosed Mr Cayne’s bridge jaunt, he said: “Wall Street is really predicated on greed. This could happen to any firm.”

Well, up to a point. The truth is that other Wall Street firms have managed to avoid Bear’s fate, so far at least. Lehman Brothers, whose shares fell sharply on Monday because it was seen as the next one in line, managed its balance sheet better and battled more effectively.

Before he stepped down as chief executive in January and handed the job to Alan Schwartz, Mr Cayne was lackadaisical about communicating with the outside world. He stepped out early from a call with investors in August to discuss the collapse of two of the bank’s hedge funds and did not even appear on others.

Mr Cayne, who is 74, was not the only bridge player. Warren Spector, whom he fired as co-president and head of securities at Bear in August, was at a bridge tournament in July as the two hedge funds were going under. Alan Greenberg, the 80-year-old chairman of its management committee and former chief executive, is also a bridge enthusiast.

Rampant card-playing was a symptom of a bigger disorder at Bear – the bank’s inward-looking and obstreperous culture. It grew up as a scrappy bond-trading firm that did not care about how others regarded it. That culminated in Mr Cayne’s (with hindsight ironic) decision in 1998 to shun the Fed-backed attempt to save the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management from collapse.

Throughout the year-long rolling crisis that ended in disaster, its leaders took the stance that it would be OK as long as its employees kept the faith. They did too little to reassure outsiders and to let them know what was going on. Last week, Bear reacted to growing uncertainty by issuing a bland and detail-free statement that it had no problems with capital or liquidity.

Nor did Bear’s leaders do enough to strengthen its balance sheet and cut leverage while they had the chance. It tried to swap $1bn stakes with Citic, the Chinese broking firm, but it was stuck with a big slice of its assets in mortgage-backed securities, which were hard to shift, and it needed more capital and longer-term secured funding to ride out trouble.

JPMorgan’s low-ball bid means that Bear’s employees, who own about a third of its equity, have collectively lost billions. With their initial shock now turning to anger and bitterness – and a desperate hope that someone will emerge with a better offer – some now argue that Bear was treated unfairly by the Federal Reserve.

Investment banks are fragile institutions. They have high leverage, they are not retail deposit-taking institutions like commercial banks and they depend on sources of funding that are prone to dry up in times of crisis. Bear veered to the brink of collapse within days because it stopped being able to raise short-term finance by lending securities in the repo market.

In principle, any broker could find itself in a similar position to Bear. That was why the Fed offered to swap up to $200bn of mortgage securities for Treasuries last week and then took the historic step on Sunday of offering to lend to investment banks through its discount window. It did not want Bear’s fate to befall others, notably Lehman Brothers.

So Lehman got more support than Bear. But you make your own luck and Lehman had already taken firmer action to bolster its balance sheet – its cash cushion was double the size of Bear’s. It also mounted a tough and disciplined campaign to reassure the waverers; on its Tuesday results call Erin Callan, its 42-year-old chief financial officer, rattled off lots of figures to prove its strength.

Bear’s leaders were nothing like as hard-working or assertive in defending their bank in the year leading up to its demise. Mr Schwartz, a laid-back corporate financier and former analyst who lacked any experience of running a securities trading business, had put more effort into outreach but lacked the time, and perhaps the appetite, to fight back effectively.

The truth is that Bear’s leadership was old, self-satisfied and inbred. It had become used to telling the same jokes, travelling to the same bridge tournaments and treating the rest of Wall Street with disdain. And when the going got tough, it allowed its institution to perish.

Read John Gapper’s Business Blog.

Wasn’t It Inevitable? Bear Stearns: The Book
Posted by Deal Journal

Who says book publishing is a slow-poke business? Only a few days after the meltdown at Bear Stearns, Bertelsmann AG’s Doubleday imprint has signed up a new book about the investment bank’s collapse and the troubles on Wall Street. “I was looking at my 401(k) plan on Friday and thinking there must be a narrative that illustrates what’s going on,” says Bill Thomas, editor-in-chief of the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group. Mr. Thomas then picked up the phone and called one of his authors, William D. Cohan, who is already under contract for another project. Mr. Cohan’s look at Lazard Frères, “The Last Tycoons,” won the 2007 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Mr. Cohan subsequently wrote a proposal over the weekend for a financial narrative that will place Bear Stearns at its hub. After speaking to Mr. Cohan’s agent, Joy Harris, Mr. Thomas struck a deal on Tuesday. The book, tentatively titled “Meltdown,” is expected to be published in spring 2009. “He will tell the story of the financial crisis in all its manifest glory through a narrative whose center is Bear Stearns,” said Mr. Thomas.

-By Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg

Trachentberg covers publishing for the Journal.

Besteiras generalizadas catadas da internet:

"Se hoje o Brasil tem uma economia sólida, é graças à competência do atual governo. Da mesma forma que o Brasil quebrou em 1998, com o colapso do fundo americano LTCM, também poderia estar quebrado agora devido à crise das bolsas e do crédito hipotecário nos Estados Unidos. "

"O colapso do LTCM não foi a causa dos problemas russo e brasileiro... O Brasil de FHC tinha grande desequilíbrio fiscal, um cambio fixo e sobre-valorizado e uma divida externa muito alta e crescente... O Brasil tem superávits fiscais primários, eliminou a componente dolarizada da dívida interna, externamente não é mais um devedor, e sim credor, tem um superávit nas contas correntes e reservas seis vezes superiores às amortizações da divida externa em um ano."

"No momento, fica claro e evidente que nem a China e nem a Índia poderão amortecer o golpe demolidor que uma recessão estadunidense representaria para o mundo. A partida de xadrez continua a se complicar com a obstinação estadunidense em manter seu sistema de consumo desmedido, com enormes déficits comercial e fiscal, aumento da dívida pública e guerras de rapina pelo mundo afora."

pois é. o pior é o "consumo desmedido". ora, cara-pálida, no limite, foi esse consumo desmedido que pagou a nossa dívida externa.

"competência do atual governo" é brincadeira...

onde vc acha essas pérolas? no orkut? Deus meu...