Gladmelding: Boligprisen stiger for n’te måned på rad!

Fra januar og frem til nå har boligprisene vist en eventyrlig vekst. I hvert fall om man skal ta tallene fra eiendomsmeglerforbundet for god fisk. En Dreyer som gliser fra øre til øre kan fortelle om en fantastisk prisstigning. Da er boligmarkedet på vei til å bli friskemeldt. I hvert fall slik eiendomsmeglerforbundet ser det. Da prisene sank, refset den samme Dreyer bankene for å være for påholdne med pengene sine. Kravet for å få lån lå nok langt over det eiendomsmeglerne fant komfortabelt. Likevel - i diverse fora har eiendomsmeglere kommet på banen og sagt at de ikke bryr seg om prisene stiger eller synker. De er interessert i en jevn omsetning. Det siste virker som en mer fornuftig tankegang. Aner jeg et opprør i egne rekker?

Media er på linje med eiendomsmeglerforbundet. Hver gang prisene går oppover, er dette gladmeldinger, boligmarkedet blir friskmeldt og lykken brer seg igjen over det ganske land. Prisstigning er en gladmelding. Da bør vi også juble over økende matvarepriser, økende bilpriser, håpe på at alle avgifter øker, fremme krav om skatteskjerpelser og håpe på at prisene på forbrukerelektronikk snur og går opp til gamle høyder. Det hadde vært gromt om en TV hadde kostet en halv årslønn. Tenk om gladmeldingene hadde stått i kø på denne måten! Av en eller annen merkelig grunn er det ikke slik. Det er bare når boligprisene inndrar kjøpekraften dette kvalifiserer som gladmeldinger. Når det gjelder alle andre priser, jubles det når de går ned. Dette undrer meg, med tanke på at de aller fleste tjener på at prisene faller. Likevel skal det jubles. Problemet med dette er at mulighetene for å eie en bolig hele tiden flyttes opp til de som tjener mest. Det er med andre ord med på å øke forskjellen mellom fattig og rik, og jo mer prisene øker jo mer øker denne forskjellen.

Jeg ser ingen grunn til å juble over slikt.

Å eie en bolig gir mange fordeler. Du får redusert formuesverdiene dine på ligningen, du får fradrag for gjeldsrenter - og fradraget er ikke begrenset til boligen, men gjelder også hytta, bilen, den andre bilen, båten og alt det andre du har fått lån til med verdistigningen i boligen.

Har du en utleiedel på huset av en bestemt art, har du skattefrie inntekter. Dette kunne du ikke fått til med hardt arbeid, men skyldes ene og alene at du er født på rett tidspunkt. Dvs. den gang det var mulig å komme inn på markedet med vanlig inntekt. Alternativ nr. 2 er at du har lånt over evne og satset på evigvarende lave renter og ditto høye lønnsøkninger.

Resultatet av en politikk som sender boligprisene i været er altså at de som har minst, tjener minst og ikke kan kjøpe en bolig, subsidierer de som kan.
Leietakeren betaler leien til en boligeier som slipper skatt på pengene. Leietakeren kan selvsagt også betale leie til en boligeier som må betale skatt på inntekten, og hva skjer da? At leietakeren betaler en sum der skatten er innkalkulert i leien. Dermed er det sannsynlig at leien man betaler til den som leier ut skattefritt også er iberegnet skatt, siden det er de profesjonelle utleierne som setter prisleiet. Man blir med andre ord straffet for ikke å være i den inntektsgruppen som kan eie. Det er dyrt å være fattig. Har du ikke råd til å eie, skal du sannelig beskattes for dette! Deler av media er av den oppfatning at jo større forskjeller det er mellom forskjellige inntektsgrupper, jo bedre er det. "Gladmelding" heter det da. Er de sadister? En bevisst sjikanering av lavtlønnede? Eller er journalistene så korttenkte og dumme at de ikke forstår sammenhengen?

Er du blant dem som lever sparsommelig, handler på salg og ikke tar opptil flere sydenturer i året? En av dem som har nedbetalt bil og en god slump med penger på sparekonto? Ja da er du i en annen gruppe som blir straffet. Du skattelegges for inntektsrenter og formuesbeskattes for hele det innestående beløpet. Du straffes for at du skaffer bankene kapital de kan sette i omløp. Kanskje du burde sette pengene dine i eiendom isteden. For hver mill som står i eiendom så verdsettes den til ca 200.000,- på ligningen. Du frarøver bankene muligheten for at sparekapitalen din kan settes i omløp og dette bør etter myndighetenes synspunkt belønnes, rikelig. Du skaffer deg leieinntekter på boligen, venter på prisstigningen, leier ut din andre bolig flytter inn i den nye et års tid og selger med skattefri fortjeneste. Det er det minste du bør ha etter alt det harde arbeidet du har lagt til grunn med å bli favorisert skattemessig. Du er tross alt rik, og dette bør andre straffes for. I hvert fall de som ligger i lavtinntektssjiktet. Du håper boligprisene aldri slutter å stige så du kan fortsette å sko deg på de som har minst. For deg er økning i boligprisene en gladmelding.

Media og de rødgrønne håper for din skyld at færre og færre kan gå deg i næringen slik at det blir flere og flere som du og noen få andre kan berike dere på. Noe annet ville være et sykdomstegn, en krise i boligmarkedet. Det er godt dere har Dreyer og media til å refse bankene for ikke å låne ut nok til de ubemidlede. Jeg forventer å se en glisende Dreyer fortelle at boligprisene har steget fra mai til juni, slik at inntektskravet for å kjøpe bolig økes ytterligere. Jeg forventer at E24 og andre medier presenterer dette som en gladmelding.

Hva gleder vel hjertet mer enn å høre om barnefamilier med lav inntekt, høy husleie og liten plass? Hva gleder vel mer enn å høre at flere og flere barn lever i fattigdom? Dette er resultatet av skyhøye boligpriser - og vel verd en haug "glameldinger".

En tupp i ræva til de som fortjener det
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Orakel

THE BEST WAY TO ROB A BANK IS TO OWN ONE

Det siste halvannet året har vi vært vitne til en nærmest uendelig rekke av såkalte redningspakker; for en stor del rene bailouts av udugelige finansakrobater. At regninga har stort sett havner hos mannen i gata, har ikke forhindret pressens nesten unisone hyllest.

Bailout er bra for økonomien, og det som er bra for økonomien, er bra for landet - og dermed for deg!

Gjennomgangsmelodien er at man skal betale ut pakkene så å si uten spørsmål, og for all del beholde nåværende ledelse. Eventuelle innstramminger i reguleringen får man ta i ettertid. Om noensinne....

Det spørs om dette er så lurt. Så lenge skadevolderne sitter trygt i sine posisjoner; det være seg i sentralbanker, finansforetak og regjeringer, vil det neppe skje substansielle endringer. Udugelige, evt. korrupte/bedragerske ledere som blir sittende, vil fjerne alle spor, og kunnskapen som kunne vært benyttet til å skape effektiv regulering, blir borte for alltid.

Mens skadevolderne beriker seg på fellesskapets bekostning...

Nok en gang...

Det er knapt 20 år siden forrige bankkrise her til lands, men lenge nok til at den stort sett er gått i glemmeboka. USA hadde dengang sin egen krise, den såkalte Savings & Loan Crisis der hundrevis av ”sparebanker” gikk dukken.
Mannen som ble satt til å rydde opp, het William K. Black. Basert på egne erfaringer, har han gitt ut boka The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry.

Nedenunder blir han intervjuet av ikke ukjente Bill Moyers. Intervjuet fant sted 3. april i år, og er et rystende vitnesbyrd om svindel, udugelighet og korrupsjon.

Black hevder at storbankene drev bevisst svindel fra dag en, og hva er vel da bedre enn å ”eie” de viktigste folkevalgte? En annen sak er at storbankene har hatt en fri flyt av ledere mellom Regjering og bankeliten, og at sistnevnte derfor i praksis har avgjort sine egne bailouts - hvilket hindrer enhver framtidig etterforskning.

Om noen skulle være i tvil: Under Obama fortsetter uvesenet med uforminsket styrke...

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal.
For months now, revelations of the wholesale greed and blatant transgressions of Wall Street have reminded us that "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One." In fact, the man you're about to meet wrote a book with just that title. It was based upon his experience as a tough regulator during one of the darkest chapters in our financial history: the savings and loan scandal in the late 1980s.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: These numbers as large as they are, vastly understate the problem of fraud.
BILL MOYERS: Bill Black was in New York this week for a conference at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice where scholars and journalists gathered to ask the question, "How do they get away with it?" Well, no one has asked that question more often than Bill Black.
The former Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention now teaches Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. During the savings and loan crisis, it was Black who accused then-house speaker Jim Wright and five US Senators, including John Glenn and John McCain, of doing favors for the S&L's in exchange for contributions and other perks. The senators got off with a slap on the wrist, but so enraged was one of those bankers, Charles Keating — after whom the senate's so-called "Keating Five" were named — he sent a memo that read, in part, "get Black — kill him dead." Metaphorically, of course. Of course.
Now Black is focused on an even greater scandal, and he spares no one — not even the President he worked hard to elect, Barack Obama. But his main targets are the Wall Street barons, heirs of an earlier generation whose scandalous rip-offs of wealth back in the 1930s earned them comparison to Al Capone and the mob, and the nickname "banksters."
Bill Black, welcome to the Journal.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Thank you.
BILL MOYERS: I was taken with your candor at the conference here in New York to hear you say that this crisis we're going through, this economic and financial meltdown is driven by fraud. What's your definition of fraud?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Fraud is deceit. And the essence of fraud is, "I create trust in you, and then I betray that trust, and get you to give me something of value." And as a result, there's no more effective acid against trust than fraud, especially fraud by top elites, and that's what we have.
BILL MOYERS: In your book, you make it clear that calculated dishonesty by people in charge is at the heart of most large corporate failures and scandals, including, of course, the S&L, but is that true? Is that what you're saying here, that it was in the boardrooms and the CEO offices where this fraud began?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: How did they do it? What do you mean?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, the way that you do it is to make really bad loans, because they pay better. Then you grow extremely rapidly, in other words, you're a Ponzi-like scheme. And the third thing you do is we call it leverage. That just means borrowing a lot of money, and the combination creates a situation where you have guaranteed record profits in the early years. That makes you rich, through the bonuses that modern executive compensation has produced. It also makes it inevitable that there's going to be a disaster down the road.
BILL MOYERS: So you're suggesting, saying that CEOs of some of these banks and mortgage firms in order to increase their own personal income, deliberately set out to make bad loans?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: How do they get away with it? I mean, what about their own checks and balances in the company? What about their accounting divisions?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: All of those checks and balances report to the CEO, so if the CEO goes bad, all of the checks and balances are easily overcome. And the art form is not simply to defeat those internal controls, but to suborn them, to turn them into your greatest allies. And the bonus programs are exactly how you do that.
BILL MOYERS: If I wanted to go looking for the parties to this, with a good bird dog, where would you send me?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, that's exactly what hasn't happened. We haven't looked, all right? The Bush Administration essentially got rid of regulation, so if nobody was looking, you were able to do this with impunity and that's exactly what happened. Where would you look? You'd look at the specialty lenders. The lenders that did almost all of their work in the sub-prime and what's called Alt-A, liars' loans.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah. Liars' loans--
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Liars' loans.
BILL MOYERS: Why did they call them liars' loans?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Because they were liars' loans.
BILL MOYERS: And they knew it?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: They knew it. They knew that they were frauds.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Liars' loans mean that we don't check. You tell us what your income is. You tell us what your job is. You tell us what your assets are, and we agree to believe you. We won't check on any of those things. And by the way, you get a better deal if you inflate your income and your job history and your assets.
BILL MOYERS: You think they really said that to borrowers?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: We know that they said that to borrowers. In fact, they were also called, in the trade, ninja loans.
BILL MOYERS: Ninja?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yeah, because no income verification, no job verification, no asset verification.
BILL MOYERS: You're talking about significant American companies.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Huge! One company produced as many losses as the entire Savings and Loan debacle.
BILL MOYERS: Which company?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: IndyMac specialized in making liars' loans. In 2006 alone, it sold $80 billion dollars of liars' loans to other companies. $80 billion.
BILL MOYERS: And was this happening exclusively in this sub-prime mortgage business?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: No, and that's a big part of the story as well. Even prime loans began to have non-verification. Even Ronald Reagan, you know, said, "Trust, but verify." They just gutted the verification process. We know that will produce enormous fraud, under economic theory, criminology theory, and two thousand years of life experience.
BILL MOYERS: Is it possible that these complex instruments were deliberately created so swindlers could exploit them?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Oh, absolutely. This stuff, the exotic stuff that you're talking about was created out of things like liars' loans, that were known to be extraordinarily bad. And now it was getting triple-A ratings. Now a triple-A rating is supposed to mean there is zero credit risk. So you take something that not only has significant, it has crushing risk. That's why it's toxic. And you create this fiction that it has zero risk. That itself, of course, is a fraudulent exercise. And again, there was nobody looking, during the Bush years. So finally, only a year ago, we started to have a Congressional investigation of some of these rating agencies, and it's scandalous what came out. What we know now is that the rating agencies never looked at a single loan file. When they finally did look, after the markets had completely collapsed, they found, and I'm quoting Fitch, the smallest of the rating agencies, "the results were disconcerting, in that there was the appearance of fraud in nearly every file we examined."
BILL MOYERS: So if your assumption is correct, your evidence is sound, the bank, the lending company, created a fraud. And the ratings agency that is supposed to test the value of these assets knowingly entered into the fraud. Both parties are committing fraud by intention.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Right, and the investment banker that — we call it pooling — puts together these bad mortgages, these liars' loans, and creates the toxic waste of these derivatives. All of them do that. And then they sell it to the world and the world just thinks because it has a triple-A rating it must actually be safe. Well, instead, there are 60 and 80 percent losses on these things, because of course they, in reality, are toxic waste.
BILL MOYERS: You're describing what Bernie Madoff did to a limited number of people. But you're saying it's systemic, a systemic Ponzi scheme.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Oh, Bernie was a piker. He doesn't even get into the front ranks of a Ponzi scheme...
BILL MOYERS: But you're saying our system became a Ponzi scheme.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Our system...
BILL MOYERS: Our financial system...
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Became a Ponzi scheme. Everybody was buying a pig in the poke. But they were buying a pig in the poke with a pretty pink ribbon, and the pink ribbon said, "Triple-A."
BILL MOYERS: Is there a law against liars' loans?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Not directly, but there, of course, many laws against fraud, and liars' loans are fraudulent.
BILL MOYERS: Because...
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Because they're not going to be repaid and because they had false representations. They involve deceit, which is the essence of fraud.
BILL MOYERS: Why is it so hard to prosecute? Why hasn't anyone been brought to justice over this?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Because they didn't even begin to investigate the major lenders until the market had actually collapsed, which is completely contrary to what we did successfully in the Savings and Loan crisis, right? Even while the institutions were reporting they were the most profitable savings and loan in America, we knew they were frauds. And we were moving to close them down. Here, the Justice Department, even though it very appropriately warned, in 2004, that there was an epidemic...
BILL MOYERS: Who did?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: The FBI publicly warned, in September 2004 that there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud, that if it was allowed to continue it would produce a crisis at least as large as the Savings and Loan debacle. And that they were going to make sure that they didn't let that happen. So what goes wrong? After 9/11, the attacks, the Justice Department transfers 500 white-collar specialists in the FBI to national terrorism. Well, we can all understand that. But then, the Bush administration refused to replace the missing 500 agents. So even today, again, as you say, this crisis is 1000 times worse, perhaps, certainly 100 times worse, than the Savings and Loan crisis. There are one-fifth as many FBI agents as worked the Savings and Loan crisis.
BILL MOYERS: You talk about the Bush administration. Of course, there's that famous photograph of some of the regulators in 2003, who come to a press conference with a chainsaw suggesting that they're going to slash, cut business loose from regulation, right?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, they succeeded. And in that picture, by the way, the other — three of the other guys with pruning shears are the...
BILL MOYERS: That's right.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: They're the trade representatives. They're the lobbyists for the bankers. And everybody's grinning. The government's working together with the industry to destroy regulation. Well, we now know what happens when you destroy regulation. You get the biggest financial calamity of anybody under the age of 80.
BILL MOYERS: But I can point you to statements by Larry Summers, who was then Bill Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury, or the other Clinton Secretary of the Treasury, Rubin. I can point you to suspects in both parties, right?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: There were two really big things, under the Clinton administration. One, they got rid of the law that came out of the real-world disasters of the Great Depression. We learned a lot of things in the Great Depression. And one is we had to separate what's called commercial banking from investment banking. That's the Glass-Steagall law. But we thought we were much smarter, supposedly. So we got rid of that law, and that was bipartisan. And the other thing is we passed a law, because there was a very good regulator, Brooksley Born, that everybody should know about and probably doesn't. She tried to do the right thing to regulate one of these exotic derivatives that you're talking about. We call them C.D.F.S. And Summers, Rubin, and Phil Gramm came together to say not only will we block this particular regulation. We will pass a law that says you can't regulate. And it's this type of derivative that is most involved in the AIG scandal. AIG all by itself, cost the same as the entire Savings and Loan debacle.
BILL MOYERS: What did AIG contribute? What did they do wrong?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: They made bad loans. Their type of loan was to sell a guarantee, right? And they charged a lot of fees up front. So, they booked a lot of income. Paid enormous bonuses. The bonuses we're thinking about now, they're much smaller than these bonuses that were also the product of accounting fraud. And they got very, very rich. But, of course, then they had guaranteed this toxic waste. These liars' loans. Well, we've just gone through why those toxic waste, those liars' loans, are going to have enormous losses. And so, you have to pay the guarantee on those enormous losses. And you go bankrupt. Except that you don't in the modern world, because you've come to the United States, and the taxpayers play the fool. Under Secretary Geithner and under Secretary Paulson before him... we took $5 billion dollars, for example, in U.S. taxpayer money. And sent it to a huge Swiss Bank called UBS. At the same time that that bank was defrauding the taxpayers of America. And we were bringing a criminal case against them. We eventually get them to pay a $780 million fine, but wait, we gave them $5 billion. So, the taxpayers of America paid the fine of a Swiss Bank. And why are we bailing out somebody who that is defrauding us?
BILL MOYERS: And why...
WILLIAM K. BLACK: How mad is this?
BILL MOYERS: What is your explanation for why the bankers who created this mess are still calling the shots?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, that, especially after what's just happened at G.M., that's... it's scandalous.
BILL MOYERS: Why are they firing the president of G.M. and not firing the head of all these banks that are involved?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: There are two reasons. One, they're much closer to the bankers. These are people from the banking industry. And they have a lot more sympathy. In fact, they're outright hostile to autoworkers, as you can see. They want to bash all of their contracts. But when they get to banking, they say, ‘contracts, sacred.' But the other element of your question is we don't want to change the bankers, because if we do, if we put honest people in, who didn't cause the problem, their first job would be to find the scope of the problem. And that would destroy the cover up.
BILL MOYERS: The cover up?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Sure. The cover up.
BILL MOYERS: That's a serious charge.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Of course.
BILL MOYERS: Who's covering up?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Geithner is charging, is covering up. Just like Paulson did before him. Geithner is publicly saying that it's going to take $2 trillion — a trillion is a thousand billion — $2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they're allowing all the banks to report that they're not only solvent, but fully capitalized. Both statements can't be true. It can't be that they need $2 trillion, because they have masses losses, and that they're fine.
These are all people who have failed. Paulson failed, Geithner failed. They were all promoted because they failed, not because...
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, Geithner has, was one of our nation's top regulators, during the entire subprime scandal, that I just described. He took absolutely no effective action. He gave no warning. He did nothing in response to the FBI warning that there was an epidemic of fraud. All this pig in the poke stuff happened under him. So, in his phrase about legacy assets. Well he's a failed legacy regulator.
BILL MOYERS: But he denies that he was a regulator. Let me show you some of his testimony before Congress. Take a look at this.
TIMOTHY GEITHNER:I've never been a regulator, for better or worse. And I think you're right to say that we have to be very skeptical that regulation can solve all of these problems. We have parts of our system that are overwhelmed by regulation.
Overwhelmed by regulation! It wasn't the absence of regulation that was the problem, it was despite the presence of regulation you've got huge risks that build up.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, he may be right that he never regulated, but his job was to regulate. That was his mission statement.
BILL MOYERS: As?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which is responsible for regulating most of the largest bank holding companies in America. And he's completely wrong that we had too much regulation in some of these areas. I mean, he gives no details, obviously. But that's just plain wrong.
BILL MOYERS: How is this happening? I mean why is it happening?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Until you get the facts, it's harder to blow all this up. And, of course, the entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts.
BILL MOYERS: What facts?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: The facts about how bad the condition of the banks is. So, as long as I keep the old CEO who caused the problems, is he going to go vigorously around finding the problems? Finding the frauds?
BILL MOYERS: You--
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Taking away people's bonuses?
BILL MOYERS: To hear you say this is unusual because you supported Barack Obama, during the campaign. But you're seeming disillusioned now.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, certainly in the financial sphere, I am. I think, first, the policies are substantively bad. Second, I think they completely lack integrity. Third, they violate the rule of law. This is being done just like Secretary Paulson did it. In violation of the law. We adopted a law after the Savings and Loan crisis, called the Prompt Corrective Action Law. And it requires them to close these institutions. And they're refusing to obey the law.
BILL MOYERS: In other words, they could have closed these banks without nationalizing them?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, you do a receivership. No one -- Ronald Reagan did receiverships. Nobody called it nationalization.
BILL MOYERS: And that's a law?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: That's the law.
BILL MOYERS: So, Paulson could have done this? Geithner could do this?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Not could. Was mandated--
BILL MOYERS: By the law.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: By the law.
BILL MOYERS: This law, you're talking about.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: What the reason they give for not doing it?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: They ignore it. And nobody calls them on it.
BILL MOYERS: Well, where's Congress? Where's the press? Where--
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, where's the Pecora investigation?
BILL MOYERS: The what?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: The Pecora investigation. The Great Depression, we said, "Hey, we have to learn the facts. What caused this disaster, so that we can take steps, like pass the Glass-Steagall law, that will prevent future disasters?" Where's our investigation?
What would happen if after a plane crashes, we said, "Oh, we don't want to look in the past. We want to be forward looking. Many people might have been, you know, we don't want to pass blame. No. We have a nonpartisan, skilled inquiry. We spend lots of money on, get really bright people. And we find out, to the best of our ability, what caused every single major plane crash in America. And because of that, aviation has an extraordinarily good safety record. We ought to follow the same policies in the financial sphere. We have to find out what caused the disasters, or we will keep reliving them. And here, we've got a double tragedy. It isn't just that we are failing to learn from the mistakes of the past. We're failing to learn from the successes of the past.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: In the Savings and Loan debacle, we developed excellent ways for dealing with the frauds, and for dealing with the failed institutions. And for 15 years after the Savings and Loan crisis, didn't matter which party was in power, the U.S. Treasury Secretary would fly over to Tokyo and tell the Japanese, "You ought to do things the way we did in the Savings and Loan crisis, because it worked really well. Instead you're covering up the bank losses, because you know, you say you need confidence. And so, we have to lie to the people to create confidence. And it doesn't work. You will cause your recession to continue and continue." And the Japanese call it the lost decade. That was the result. So, now we get in trouble, and what do we do? We adopt the Japanese approach of lying about the assets. And you know what? It's working just as well as it did in Japan.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah. Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: You are.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely, because they are scared to death. All right? They're scared to death of a collapse. They're afraid that if they admit the truth, that many of the large banks are insolvent. They think Americans are a bunch of cowards, and that we'll run screaming to the exits. And we won't rely on deposit insurance. And, by the way, you can rely on deposit insurance. And it's foolishness. All right? Now, it may be worse than that. You can impute more cynical motives. But I think they are sincerely just panicked about, "We just can't let the big banks fail." That's wrong.
BILL MOYERS: But what might happen, at this point, if in fact they keep from us the true health of the banks?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, then the banks will, as they did in Japan, either stay enormously weak, or Treasury will be forced to increasingly absurd giveaways of taxpayer money. We've seen how horrific AIG -- and remember, they kept secrets from everyone.
BILL MOYERS: A.I.G. did?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: What we're doing with -- no, Treasury and both administrations. The Bush administration and now the Obama administration kept secret from us what was being done with AIG. AIG was being used secretly to bail out favored banks like UBS and like Goldman Sachs. Secretary Paulson's firm, that he had come from being CEO. It got the largest amount of money. $12.9 billion. And they didn't want us to know that. And it was only Congressional pressure, and not Congressional pressure, by the way, on Geithner, but Congressional pressure on AIG.
Where Congress said, "We will not give you a single penny more unless we know who received the money." And, you know, when he was Treasury Secretary, Paulson created a recommendation group to tell Treasury what they ought to do with AIG. And he put Goldman Sachs on it.
BILL MOYERS: Even though Goldman Sachs had a big vested stake.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Massive stake. And even though he had just been CEO of Goldman Sachs before becoming Treasury Secretary. Now, in most stages in American history, that would be a scandal of such proportions that he wouldn't be allowed in civilized society.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, like a conflict of interest, it seems.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Massive conflict of interests.
BILL MOYERS: So, how did he get away with it?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: I don't know whether we've lost our capability of outrage. Or whether the cover up has been so successful that people just don't have the facts to react to it.
BILL MOYERS: Who's going to get the facts?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: We need some chairmen or chairwomen--
BILL MOYERS: In Congress.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: --in Congress, to hold the necessary hearings. And we can blast this out. But if you leave the failed CEOs in place, it isn't just that they're terrible business people, though they are. It isn't just that they lack integrity, though they do. Because they were engaged in these frauds. But they're not going to disclose the truth about the assets.
BILL MOYERS: And we have to know that, in order to know what?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: To know everything. To know who committed the frauds. Whose bonuses we should recover. How much the assets are worth. How much they should be sold for. Is the bank insolvent, such that we should resolve it in this way? It's the predicate, right? You need to know the facts to make intelligent decisions. And they're deliberately leaving in place the people that caused the problem, because they don't want the facts. And this is not new. The Reagan Administration's central priority, at all times, during the Savings and Loan crisis, was covering up the losses.
BILL MOYERS: So, you're saying that people in power, political power, and financial power, act in concert when their own behinds are in the ringer, right?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: That's right. And it's particularly a crisis that brings this out, because then the class of the banker says, "You've got to keep the information away from the public or everything will collapse. If they understand how bad it is, they'll run for the exits."
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, and this week in New York, at this conference, you described this as more than a financial crisis. You called it a moral crisis.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Because it is a fundamental lack of integrity. But also because, if you look back at crises, an economist who is also a presidential appointee, as a regulator in the Savings and Loan industry, right here in New York, Larry White, wrote a book about the Savings and Loan crisis. And he said, you know, one of the most interesting questions is why so few people engaged in fraud? Because objectively, you could have gotten away with it. But only about ten percent of the CEOs, engaged in fraud. So, 90 percent of them were restrained by ethics and integrity. So, far more than law or by F.B.I. agents, it's our integrity that often prevents the greatest abuses. And what we had in this crisis, instead of the Savings and Loan, is the most elite institutions in America engaging or facilitating fraud.
BILL MOYERS: This wound that you say has been inflicted on American life. The loss of worker's income. And security and pensions and future happened, because of the misconduct of a relatively few, very well-heeled people, in very well-decorated corporate suites, right?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Right.
BILL MOYERS: It was relatively a handful of people.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: And their ideologies, which swept away regulation. So, in the example, regulation means that cheaters don't prosper. So, instead of being bad for capitalism, it's what saves capitalism. "Honest purveyors prosper" is what we want. And you need regulation and law enforcement to be able to do this. The tragedy of this crisis is it didn't need to happen at all.
BILL MOYERS: When you wake in the middle of the night, thinking about your work, what do you make of that? What do you tell yourself?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: There's a saying that we took great comfort in. It's actually by the Dutch, who were fighting this impossible war for independence against what was then the most powerful nation in the world, Spain. And their motto was, "It is not necessary to hope in order to persevere."
Now, going forward, get rid of the people that have caused the problems. That's a pretty straightforward thing, as well. Why would we keep CEOs and CFOs and other senior officers, that caused the problems? That's facially nuts. That's our current system.
So stop that current system. We're hiding the losses, instead of trying to find out the real losses. Stop that, because you need good information to make good decisions, right? Follow what works instead of what's failed. Start appointing people who have records of success, instead of records of failure. That would be another nice place to start. There are lots of things we can do. Even today, as late as it is. Even though they've had a terrible start to the administration. They could change, and they could change within weeks. And by the way, the folks who are the better regulators, they paid their taxes. So, you can get them through the vetting process a lot quicker.
BILL MOYERS: William Black, thank you very much for being with me on the Journal.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Thank you so much.

Vi sier takk til Moyers og Black.

Her hjemme må vi foreløpig nøye oss med Kjell Inge Røkke. Når levestandarden hans trues, er han aldri mer enn telefon unna nye milliarder fra skattebetalerne. Noen fordeler må man jo ha av å være oligark - og AP-medlem med bekjentskaper til topps i parti og faagforening. Dessuten har mannen en genial personalpolitikk som sikrer avdankede, men ikke altfor skarpe politikere fete jobber og styreverv innen konsernet.

Vi tillater oss å betvile at man noen gang kommer til bunns i denne saken, like lite som man finner ut hva som egentlig foregikk mellom Statsministeren og DnB NOR-Bjerke i oktober.

Det er dette vi kaller demokrati.

Mvh
Buffett


Resultatet av pollen Bør Oljefondet granskes?
endte med 87 % (381 stemmer) for og 12% (53 stemmer) mot gransking.

I skyggen av G20...

Mens Gordon og Barack blir enige om å tilføre IMF ytterligere 3.400 milliarder i såkalte nye penger, skjer det litt av hvert i USA:

- The Financial Accounting Standards Board, pressured by U.S. lawmakers and financial companies, voted to relax fair-value rules that Citigroup Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. say don’t work when markets are inactive.
The changes to so-called mark-to-market accounting allow companies to use “significant” judgment when gauging the price of some investments on their books, including mortgage-backed securities. Analysts say the measure may reduce banks’ writedowns and boost their first-quarter net income by 20 percent or more. FASB voted 3-2 to approve the rules at a meeting today in Norwalk, Connecticut.
“Congress clearly indicated that some easing was probably appropriate in this instance,” House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland said today in a Bloomberg Television interview.
House Financial Services Committee members pressed FASB Chairman Robert Herz at a March 12 hearing to revise fair-value, which requires banks to mark assets each quarter to reflect market prices, saying the rule unfairly punished financial companies. FASB’s proposals, made four days later, spurred criticism from investor advocates and accounting-industry groups, which say fair-value forces companies to disclose their true financial health.
Financial shares rose after the FASB move. Citigroup rose 4 percent to $2.79 at 11:46 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. Bank of America Corp. added 5.5 percent to $7.44. JPMorgan Chase & Co. rose 1 percent to $28.36.
Seeking Suspension
Blackstone Group LP Chairman Stephen Schwarzman, the American Bankers Association and 65 lawmakers in the House of Representatives last September urged that fair-value accounting, mandated by FASB, be suspended. William Isaac, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. from 1981 to 1985, has called fair value “extremely and needlessly destructive” and “a major cause” of the credit crisis. Robert Rubin, the former Citigroup senior counselor and Treasury secretary, said Jan. 27 the rule has done “a great deal of damage.”
“Good decision,” Citigroup Chairman Richard Parsons said of FASB’s move. The market for mortgages and other assets was not working, so something had to change, Parsons said in a New York interview today.
Banks rely on competitors’ asset sales to help determine the fair-market value of similar securities they hold on their own books. FASB’s staff conceded their March 17 proposal led to a “presumption” that all security sales are “distressed” unless evidence proves otherwise. Such an interpretation may have allowed financial companies to ignore transactions in valuing their assets.
‘Orderly’ Transactions
FASB staff said banks should only disregard transactions that aren’t “orderly,” including situations in which the “seller is near bankruptcy” or needed to sell the asset to comply with regulatory requirements. Responding to criticism from investor and accounting groups, the staff said in a report today it was not FASB’s intent “to change the objective of a fair-value measurement.”
Fair-value “provides the kind of transparency essential to restoring public confidence in U.S. markets,” former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt said in an interview yesterday.
Levitt is co-chairman, along with former SEC head William Donaldson, of the Investors’ Working Group, a non-partisan panel formed to recommend improvements to regulation of U.S. financial markets. Other members of the group, which met in New York yesterday, include Brooksley Born, former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Bill Miller, chief investment officer of Legg Mason Capital Management Inc.
‘Deeply Concerned’
“The group is deeply concerned about the apparent FASB succumbing to political pressures, which prevent U.S. investors from understanding the true obligations of U.S. financial institutions,” Levitt said. Levitt is a senior adviser at buyout firm Carlyle Group and a board member at Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News.
Fair-value requires companies to set values on most securities each quarter based on market prices. Wells Fargo and other banks argue the rule doesn’t make sense when trading has dried up because it forces companies to write down assets to fire-sale prices.
By letting banks use internal models instead of market prices and allowing them to take into account the cash flow of securities, FASB’s changes could raise bank industry earnings by 20 percent, according to Robert Willens, a former managing director at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. who runs his own tax and accounting advisory firm in New York.
Companies weighed down by mortgage-backed securities, such as New York-based Citigroup, could cut their losses by 50 percent to 70 percent, said Richard Dietrich, an accounting professor at Ohio State University in Columbus.
-------------------

Mark to Fantasy er nok mer betegnende enn Fair Value. Dette er godt nytt for oss alle: Fra nå av burde kjøpmannen på hjørnet bokføre lagre av råtne tomater og epler til full pris. Eller hva med fjorårets mobiltelefoner og spillkonsoller?

Rallyet vi har hatt den siste måneden, ble sparket i gang av rykter om ”god inntjening” i BOA og Citigroup. Det som ikke kom så tydelig fram, var at denne ”inntjeningen” var resultatet av - og en av hovedårsakene til - myndighetenes AIG-bailout.



Om PPT virkelig eksisterer, er de arbeidsledige for tida. Obama-administrasjonen gjør alt mellom himmel og jord for å pynte på grisen. Så har de da også all verdens ekspertise: Klovnene Summers og Geithner var i fremste rekke da grunnlaget for dagens ragnarok ble lagt. Dessverre uten å ha lært noe som helst.

Brent barn.... lukter ille!


God grøt!

Buffett

Har kan du lese Dagbladets og VGs dyptpløyende reportasjer fra G20 møtet.

Ron Paul - What if...

Ærlighet og integritet er kanskje ikke det man forbinder med amerikanske politikere. Heldigvis finnes det ett unntak: Ron Paul. Vi sier ikke mer....

Ad Stoltenbergs gamle lærebøker og andre rare ting

Vi blir alltid beroliget når Finans- eller Statsministeren uttaler seg om økonomi; da går det virkelig opp for oss at vi er i trygge hender. I går slo Statsministeren opp i sine gamle lærebøker:

Stoltenbergs gamle lærebøker
Jeg leste om noen rare greier som jeg ikke trodde ville skje. Nå skjer det, sier statsminister Jens Stoltenberg.
Når statsminister Jens Stoltenberg tenker tilbake på studietiden blir han overrasket over hvor mye av det han lærte som senere har vist seg å være sant.

Buffett: Hadde Statsministeren forstått pensum, ville han nok vært bedre forberedt på krisen.

Krisen har inspirert statsministeren og samfunnsøkonomen til å ta frem igjen teoriene fra gamle lærebøker. Teorier han trodde var utdatert etter den "nye" økonomiens fremmarsj.

Buffett: ”Den nye økonomien” har vært ”invistorenes” favorittmantra. For ikke å snakke om ”fordelene ved inflasjonsstyring” og ”frakopling”.

- Jeg blir litt overrasket hvor mye av det vi lærte som er sant, sier Stoltenberg på Finansnæringens hovedorganisasjons årskonferanse i Oslo tirsdag.
Han trekker først frem den britiske økonomen John Maynard Keynes' teori om likviditetsfellen.
Kort sagt går teorien ut på at man setter rentene så lavt at lavere renter ikke lenger biter.

Buffett: Og dette går vi inn i med åpne øyne!

Dermed må man ta i bruk andre virkemidler som for eksempel kvantitative lettelser, som i klartekst betyr å trykke nye penger.
- Jeg leste om noen rare greier som jeg ikke trodde ville skje. Nå skjer det (Buffetts uthevn.), konstaterer statsministeren.
Han viser til at USA og Storbritannia har satt rentene sine så lavt at nasjonene nå bruker de såkalte kvantitative lettelsene for å få ned rentene.

Buffett: Japan forsøkte også kvantitative lettelser etter boblene på slutten av 80-tallet. Uten nevneverdige resultater.
Det USA og Storbritannia burde gjøre var å la tingene gå sin gang. La aktivaprisene falle til sitt naturlige nivå, og nasjonalisere bankene etter hvert som de konker. Det de gjør nå, er å selge arbeidskraften til barnebarna og oldebarna sine for at oligarkene skal få tilbake pengene sine - endog bli enda rikere...

Spareparadokset
- Tilsvarende er det med spareparadokset. Det går ut på at dersom alle vil spare vil den samlede sparingen gå ned, forklarer Stoltenberg.
Selv om folks sparetilbøyelighet går opp, vil økt sparing føre til at produksjonen går ned. Dermed vil den samlede sparingen bli mindre.
- Det er en gammel lærdom fra 30-tallet som dukker opp igjen nå, konstaterer Stoltenberg.

Buffett: ”Spareparadokset” er ikke det minste merkelig. Det virkelige spareparadokset er atskillig vanskeligere å forklare: Tross fantastisk ”reallønnsøkning” i Norge under Stoltenberg, er spareraten 0!!

Motkonjunkturpolitikk
Han peker på at en annen lærdom av krisen er at markedet ikke regulerer seg selv.
Han mener krisen har vist at markedet må reguleres og stabiliseres.

Buffett: Stoltenberg har vært en stor forkjemper for regulering i regjeringsposisjon:

Giganten DnB NOR hadde neppe vært mulig uten hans bidrag...
Banken utgjør dermed en systemisk trusel.

Kredittilsynet har gjort en kjempejobb med å forhindre for høye boliglån...
Vi har dermed tidenes høyeste gjeldsgrad.

Leverage? Hva i huleste er det?

Å drive motkonjunkturpolitikk er plutselig blitt allemannseie igjen.
- Å drive motkonjunkturpolitikk var på 1970-, 80- og 90-tallet litt spesielt for litt foreldede sosialdemokrater. Nå er alle enige om at det er nødvendig, slår Stoltenberg fast.

Buffett: Dessverre har Stoltenberg drevet motkonjunktur-, eller skal vi heller si medkonjunkturpolitikk under hele oppgangsperioden. Vi er spent på hvor mye mer daukjøtt det er mulig å putte inn i offentlig sektor, hvor mange flere som må på trygd, og hvor mange nye bruer til nowhere det er mulig å bygge.

Skal vi drive motkonjunkturpolitikk må vi ha samfunnsøkonomisk nytte av tiltaket - utover det kortsiktige å skaffe folk jobb!

Vi tør ikke engang nevne hvem som innførte den geniale inflasjonsstyringen som sikret lave renter selv i oppgangstider (og som er mye av roten til problemet world wide)...

Vi husker med gru hvordan Stoltenbergs aner og brødre i ånden fylte hver ledige fjord med skip i opplag på 70-tallet. Hvem glemmer vel Kleppepakker finansiert med oljepenger vi enda ikke hadde og påfølgende skyhøye inflasjon!

Gamle Keynes fablet om at man kunne ansette folk bare for å grave hull, for så å fylle dem igjen.

Vi er redd det er nettopp dette Stoltenberg har i tankene...

Buffetts tese om utagerende keynesiamisme:

Blir hullet for dypt, kommer vi ikke opp igjen!























Motkonjunkturfantastene har en del huller i sin skolelærdom. Hadde Stoltenberg virkelig lært noe på Universitetet, ville han skjønt at boligpriser som har tatt fullstendig farvel med lønningene ikke er bærekraftig. Han ville forstått at prisoppgangen skyldes for lave renter, for sløv regulering og banker som gikk amok. Han ville forstått at boligprisveksten er et pyramidesespill. Dog langt mer alvorlig enn WGI og T5PC.

Dette er ”Den Nye Økonomien” i et nøtteskall!

Stoltenbergs løsninger på finanskrisen er mer forutsigbart enn enn snø og is i Antarktis og sand i Sahara. Mennesket trenger korrektiver, men det er ikke det du får mest i AP-miljøene i SSB og på Utøya. Enda lavere renter og bankenes gullkort fører bare til at befolkningen blir ytterligere forgjeldet, og vi vil ikke kunne få noen bærekraftig vekst etter at krisen er tilbakelagt.

Vi har et par gode råd med på veien; råd Statsministeren definitivt ikke vil få fra Jan Davidsen, Valla og Halvorsen:

Se krisen som en mulighet!

La usunne virksomheter gå dukken selv om det dreier seg om banker og hjørnesteinsbedrifter! Foreta nødvendig omorganisering og effektivisering av offentlig sektor! Ikke ansett flere, men utnytt ressursene bedre. Et sted å begynne er fjerningen av fylkeskommunen samt sammenslåing av kommuner a la Danmark. Endre pensjons-, trygde- og sosiale ordninger slik at det lønner seg å jobbe!

Oljeinntektene og Oljefondet kan - på kort sikt - kompensere for en fullstendig skakkjørt økonomisk politikk. Men vi ville ikke gamblet på det. Slyngstads record tilsier at fondet kan forsvinne i svarte hull i amerikansk økonomi før vi aner.

Gjedrems stadige devalueringer er som å pisse i buksa. En dag kommer regninga på bordet for en eksportnæring med alt høyt lønnsnivå - og for lav produktivitet.

Dette blir bra.

I en totalglobalisert verden.


God grøt!

Buffett

Vi har ikke hatt tid til å sette oss inn i NEF-statistikken for mars, men har fått med oss at dette er Råeste boligfest på mange år (NA24 i dag).

Midt i finanskrisen blomstrer boligmarkedet
------------
Fersk statistikk viser at boligprisene steg med 0,1 prosent i mars, men at de sesongjustert falt med 0,2 prosent.

Buffett: Dette var helt rått. Det hadde vært interessant å se på modellen for sesongjustering, all den stund prisene normalt øker langt mer i mars. Noe som ikke blir sesongjustert, er derimot salgstallene:

Antallet solgte boliger i mars var 5.049, noe som er en oppgang på 6,8 prosent fra samme periode i fjor.

Buffett: En helt rå oppgang. Spesielt siden påsken i fjor var i mars!

Ellers blir vi bombardert av gla´meldinger fra det alt er rosenrødt i det amerikanske boligmarkedet:

STØRRE PRISFALL ENN VENTET:
Boligprisene ned 19 % i USA
Boligprisene i USA har falt hver måned siden januar i 2007, og fallet virker langt i fra å være over.
Ny prisstatistikk fra S&P/Case-Shiller viser at prisene for eneboliger annualisert hadde falt 19 prosent ved utgangen av januar.
- Aksellererer ikke
- Det positive her er at fallet ikke aksellererer så mye lenger – men på den andre siden er det fortsatt et stort overheng av boliger til salgs, sier sjeføkonom Steinar Juel i Nordea til E24.
- Men egentlig var dette omtrent som ventet, og ingen stor overraskelse, sier Juel.
Indeksen måler utviklingen i 20 amerikanske storbyer. I løpet av januar falt boligprisene med 2,8 prosent, mens økonomene i forkant hadde ventet et fall på 2 prosent.
- Boligprisene som toppet ut i midten av 2006, fortsatte nedgangen ved inngangen til 2009, sier styreleder David M. Blitzer i indekskomiteen i S&P i en uttalelse, ifølge Reuters.
Prisfallet er det kraftigste som er registrert siden indeksen begynte å måle utviklingen i 2001.
- Å stoppe prisfallet for boliger er avgjørende for å få en slutt på resesjonen, sier sjeføkonom John Silvia i Wachovia til Bloomberg.
Fall overalt
Alle de 20 byene i indeksen har hatt boligprisfall det seneste året. Den verste utviklingen er i Phoenix og Las Vegas hvor boligprisene har falt henholdsvis 35 og 32,5 prosent på et år.
- Det er veldig få lyspunkter man kan se i statistikken. I mesteparten av landet ser det ut til at den nedadgående trenden fortsetter, sier Blitzer.
Tvangssalg er en viktig grunn til at boligprisene faller, og i februar var tvangssalgene 30 prosent høyere enn i samme måned i fjor.

Først en ballong, så en bank

Den norske givergleden er viden kjent. I hvert fall innen Rikets grenser. Vi liker å være snille, og ser på oss selv Guds gave til menneskeheten. Sult, nød og krig - vi er straks på pletten. Først i form av stats- og spilleautomatfinansierte NGOer, deretter Staten selv - enkelte ganger anført av dypt empatiske ministre som aldri har hatt en karriere i internasjonale organisasjoner i tankene.

Det er typisk norsk å være god - og snill.

På fredag tok Finansministeren på seg spanderbuksene:

KRISTIN HALVORSEN ØSER AV OLJEMILLIARDENE:
Gir milliardlån
Vi har sett at finansiell støtte fra Det internasjonale pengefondet (IMF) er viktig også for land i vår nærhet, sier finansminister Kristin Halvorsen.

Finansminister Kristin Halvorsen sendte fredag et brev til administrerende direktør i det internasjonale pengefondet (IMF) med tilbud om å stille ekstra lånemidler til disposisjon for fondet.
- Støtte til land som er særlig hardt rammet av økonomisk krise, er en kjerneoppgave for IMF. Vi har sett at finansiell støtte fra IMF er viktig også for land i vår nærhet, som for eksempel Island og Latvia, sier finansminister Kristin Halvorsen.
Hun synes Norge har god nok økonomi til å hjelpe det internasjonale samfunnet.
- I den dype internasjonale krisen vi nå befinner oss i, er det viktig å sikre at IMF har tilstrekkelig utlånskapasitet. Det er naturlig at Norge, som har betydelige internasjonale reserver, bidrar til dette, sier Halvorsen.
30 milliarder kroner
Finansministeren trenger støtte fra Stortinget for å gjennomføre planene.
- Fra norsk side tenker vi oss en ramme på opp til 30 milliarder kroner gitt at Stortinget samtykker, sier finansministeren.
Brevet fra finansministeren til det internasjonale pengefondet orienterer også om norske G20-posisjoner.
Ressurssituasjonen i de internasjonale finansieringsinstitusjonene er blant hovedtemaene for møtet som stats- og regjeringssjefene i G20-landene skal ha i London 2. april.
- Særlig oppmerksomhet er det om behovet for å sikre utlånskapasiteten til IMF, sier Halvorsen.

Om Kristin er for - eller mot IMF svever litt i det blå. Akkurat som spørsmålet om kontinuerlig økende forbruksvekst kontra miljøvern.

Vi gleder oss til valgkampen. Da blir det nok andre boller...

Folk tenker vel som så at interessen for Østersjølandenes ve og vel skyldes medmenneskelighet. Uten reflektere over at Staten har 1/3 av aksjene i DnB NOR. Og uten å reflektere over at banken er sterkt eksponert i Baltikum (riktignok under dekknavnet DnB NORD). Hvis de overhodet vet det...

Bank DnB NORD: a joint venture for future growth.
Bank DnB NORD is a joint venture between Norwegian DnB NOR and German NORD/LB Norddeutsche Landesbank, which started operations in January 2006. The bank, with subsidiaries and branches in Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, profits from the two parent banks' expertise and strengths. Bank DnB NORD offers a comprehensive range of quality financial products and services to households as well as businesses. The headquarters of Bank DnB NORD are situated in Copenhagen. With over 3,300 employees, 178 offices, more than 860,000 customers and assets totalling EUR 11.2 billion, DnB NORD is a significant player in North-Eastern Europe.

Dessverre ser det ut til noen har stukket hull på Bjerkes storslåtte visjoner (NA24, 120209):

--------------
I dag kom det frem at banken han ledet også har betydelige problemer. I DnB NORs konsernregnskap belaster tapene i DnB NORD regnskapet med 1.053 millioner kroner i utlånstap.
Bank-ballong
DnB NORD ble etablert i 2005 som et samarbeid mellom norske DnB NOR og tyske NORD/LB.
Banken har vokst raskt ut fra hovedkvarteret i København, og i dag den tredje største banken i Lithauen, den fjerde største i Latvia og nummer fem i Estland.

Firmasymbolet er en rød ballong, eller som det heter i bankens eget reklamemateriell:

"Først en ballong, så en bank"

Nå har utlånsballongen sprukket med et smell og resultatet er enorme tap over hele linja.
Tap på danske eiendommer
Det største tapet kommer fra lån til næringseien- dommer i Danmark. Nesten 600 millioner kroner av tapene stammer fra misligholdte danske eiendomslån. Totalt er tapene i DnB NORD fem ganger høyere enn tapene generelt i DnB NOR-konsernet.

Den danske datterbanken har klart å tape penger flere kvartaler på rad, til tross for at overskuddet før tap har økt.
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DnB NORD (millioner kr.)

Danmark Utlån: 12 865 bokf. tap 832

Latvia Utlån: 26 430 bokf. tap 218

Lithauen Utlån: 34 056 bokf. tap 241

Polen Utlån: 11 622 bokf. tap 54

Estland Utlån: 3 728 bokf. tap 41

Finland Utlån: 9 821 bokf. tap 2

Totalt Utlån: 98 522 bokf. tap 1 388
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Tabellen indikerer at banken så langt har avskrevet småbløp i Baltikum.
554 millioner av totalt nærmere 76.000 millioner i utlån. Altså godt under prosenten. Gad vite hva som skjer ved et tap på 10-20%, eller hva med 30%??

På toppen av tidenes høykonjunktur, har den usedvanlig kompetente - og i utlandet sterkt etterspurte ledelsen - gardert seg med 137,8 milliarder i shippinglån. Hvorav 20 milliarder til tørrbulk.....

I fjerde kvartal tok DnB Nor tre millioner kroner i tapsavsetninger på shippingporteføljen. I tillegg tok banken en gruppeavsetning på 60 millioner kroner

Vi blir uhyre overrasket dersom banken er fullastet med giftige lån til næringseiendom her hjemme....

Fra DnB NORs innerste sirkler:

Pressen gjorde et stort nummer ut av Bjerkes SMS til Bulke-Jens på høsten i fjor. Personlige bekjentskaper er vel vanskelig å unngå her på berget; spørsmålene som burde vært stilt er langt mer alvorlige:

-Hvordan kan en bank få lov å vokse til den utgjør en systemisk trusel?
-Har storfinansen innflytelse på bekostning av demokratiske avgjørelser?
-Utgjør statlig eierskap noen som helst garanti for edruelig styring av selskap?
-Styrer Staten DnB NOR - eller er det omvendt?

Vi gir oss der; en dåre kan spørre....

Skulle ulykken være ute, er det godt å vite hvem som må rydde opp. Det er deg og meg - mens ledelsen kan meske seg med bonus, etterlønn og pensjon.

Der har de betydelig spisskompetanse...


God grøt

Buffett



Her i Krakk! har vi ofte harselert med offisielle tall. Vi mener bestemt at byråer i fordums DDR og Sovjet kunne hatt mye å lære av vestlig statistikk. Barrons ser ut til å være enig:

In Dante's Footsteps
IT'S A COMFORT IN THIS wildly spinning world to find some things remain the same. We had feared that with the change in administrations, we'd have to revise our long-standing mistrust of government statistics. But, though it is still early days, the initial evidence gives us reason for hope. The numbers flowing out of Washington seem as dubious as ever, and so are the inferences being extracted from them by more than a smattering of investment strategists, money managers and, it pains us to say, even journalists.
The misleading figures cut across a wide swath of the economy, encompassing housing, manufacturing, employment -- you name it. The leading agent of deception, unintentional or otherwise, has been that old sly villain, seasonal adjustment. As it turns out, the seasons don't need adjustment as much as the adjustors need seasoning.
As Merrill Lynch's David Rosenberg (who, incidentally, is planning to do a bit of adjusting himself and moving back to his native Canada; our loss, Canada's gain) points out in a recent commentary, the official keepers of the books have been unusually aggressive in constructing seasonal adjustments for February's economic data.
To illustrate, the seasonal adjustment for new-home sales was the strongest since 1982; for durable-goods orders, the strongest since they were first released in 1992; the retail-sales figures for February were flat (or, as David says, flattering) after such adjustment, but unadjusted fell 3%, the biggest drop on record. He also notes dryly that the 40,000 raw non-seasonally adjusted housing-start total for February "all of a sudden becomes a headline-adjusted annual rate figure of 583,000."
Which makes David think that come the inevitably sharp downward revisions of such distorted data, first-quarter real GDP is likely to suffer a 7.2% drop. Which, together with the 6.3% skid in the fourth quarter of 2008, would be the worst back-to-back contraction in the economy in 50 years.

Mish følger som alltid ledighetstallene med argusøyne:

Grim Statistics
The official unemployment rate is 8.1%. However, if you start counting all the people that want a job but gave up, all the people with part-time jobs that want a full-time job, all the people who dropped off the unemployment rolls because their unemployment benefits ran out, etc., you get a closer picture of what the unemployment rate is. That number is in the last row labeled U-6.
The government is reporting 8.1% but a far better approximation is 14.8%. Many economists expect the "official" number to hit 10%. If and when that happens where will U-6 be?

U-6 minus U-3

The pattern is pretty unmistakable. In one year the official unemployment rate rose from 4.8 to 8.1 (3.3) while U6 rose from 9.0 to 14.8 (5.8).
Assuming U3 hits 10%, U6 is likely to be approaching 20%. How bad Michigan, California, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, and Rhode Island are by then is anyone's guess.

These are depression level statistics.

Highway to Hell!

I siste nummer av "Invistornytt" var vi innom Geithners briljante plan for å fjerne bad assets fra bankenes balanse. Nå som før, er vi motstandere av moral hazard; av å flytte risikoen fra de udugelige og over på de uskyldige - dvs. skattebetalerne.

Atskillig verre for økonomien, er at denne finansalkymien vil føre til enda mer feilallokering av ressurser: Hvem i hule er så tett i nøtta at han investerer i noe produktivt, når risikoen er atskillig mindre og oppsiden langt større i den Geithnerske pyramiden?

Når hjemlandets presse oversvømmes av svada av typen: - Ti prosent årlig økning - er bloggosfæren god å ha.

Også Mish tok opp Geithners "plan" i går. Her anfører han hvilke misforståelser som ligger til grunn for planen om å fjerne bad assets fra bankenes balanse:

Five Misconceptions
The trouble with the economy is that the banks aren't lending. The reality: The economy is in trouble because American consumers and businesses took on way too much debt and are now collapsing under the weight of it.
The banks aren't lending because their balance sheets are loaded with "bad assets" that the market has temporarily mispriced. The reality: The banks aren't lending (much) because they have decided to stop making loans to people and companies who can't pay them back.
Bad assets are "bad" because the market doesn't understand how much they are really worth. The reality: The bad assets are bad because they are worth less than the banks say they are.
Once we get the "bad assets" off bank balance sheets, the banks will start lending again. The reality: The banks will remain cautious about lending, because the housing market and economy are still deteriorating. So they'll sit there and say they are lending while waiting for the economy to bottom.
Once the banks start lending, the economy will recover. The reality: American consumers still have debt coming out of their ears, and they'll be working it off for years.

Så lenge man ikke klarer å identifisere problemene, vil løsningene være i det blå.

Artikkelen er ledsaget av en graf som sier litt om gjeldsbelastningen i dag sammenliknet med den store depresjonen:

Total Credit Market Debt vs. GDP

For ordens skyld: makrofolket her hjemme lider av de samme misoppfatningene - noe som dessverre ikke borger så bra for framtida.

Dagens post tar for seg FEDs ørkesløse forsøk på å vekke økonomien til live gjennom quantitative easing:

Krugman´s 200 Billion Lunch
Paul Krugman frequently proposes solutions straight out of the "free lunch" handbook. However, in one recent case, Krugman actually managed to put a price tag on the lunch. That price is $200 billion.
Please consider Fiscal aspects of quantitative easing (wonkish).
The big policy news [last] week has been the Fed’s decision to buy $1 trillion of long-term bonds, going beyond the normal policy of buying only short-term debt. Good move — but it’s probably worth pointing out that yes, this does expose the Fed, and indirectly the taxpayer, to some risks. And in so doing, it blurs the line between fiscal and monetary policy.
Now, the Fed isn’t taking on any serious default risk.
The Fed is, however, creating a new liability: the monetary base it creates to buy these bonds. In effect, it’s printing $1 trillion of money, and using those funds to buy bonds. Is this inflationary? We hope so! The whole reason for quantitative easing is that normal monetary expansion, printing money to buy short-term debt, has no traction thanks to near-zero rates. Gaining some traction — in effect, having some inflationary effect — is what the policy is all about.

But here’s the rub: if and when the economy recovers, it’s likely that long-term interest rates will rise, especially if the Fed’s current policy is successful in bringing them down. And this also means that selling the bonds at market prices won’t be enough to withdraw all the money now being created.
My back of the envelope calculation looks like this: if the Fed buys $1 trillion of 10-year bonds at 2.5%, and has to sell those bonds in an environment where the market demands a yield to maturity of more than 5%, it will take around a $200 billion loss.
I’m not complaining; I think quantitative easing (it’s really qualitative easing, but I give up on trying to fix the terminology) is the right way to go. But we should go into it with our eyes open.
Fatally Flawed Thinking

I commend Krugman for attempting to put a price tag on his lunch. However, his analysis of the costs and the benefits of that lunch is fatally flawed.

For starters the Fed cannot force long term interest rates down without committing an unlimited amount of purchases, and perhaps not even then. Simply put, the Fed cannot change the primary trend. If long-term interest rates are headed higher there is little the Fed can do about it.
Japan proved that currency manipulation does not work, and I see little reason for open intervention in the treasury market to work either.

Yes, there was a huge treasury rally on the announcement. Was this because of the news or was the market ready to rally anyway? I think the latter. The long bond rallied as did the 10-year treasury, the latter right at a 50% retrace of the move down from mid-October. It was an oversized move but treasuries have sold off three consecutive days since the announcement.

Prices Set At The Margin
Barring short term manipulative disruptions, yields are going to go where they were going to go in the absence of intervention.

Prices of commodities, treasuries, currencies, etc. are set at the margin. And as soon as the massive marginal buyer (the Fed) stops buying, rates will go back to where they were going without the intervention. So committing $1 trillion will not do a damn thing as soon as the money is used up.

Moreover, as long as the Fed is willing to buy assets at inflated prices, there will be an endless supply of sellers (den såkalte Vollvikmetoden, Buffetts anm.). Given enough time and enough dollar commitment, eventually no one would own treasuries but the Fed. Imagine the complications unwinding that.

Fed Can Exaggerate, Not Change The Trend
While the Fed cannot change the trend, it can exaggerate it. Thus if interest rates are not ready to go down on their own accord, attempts to force them down will fail, but unwinding them might cause a bigger problem than Krugman thinks.

Does Quantitative Easing Even Work?
For the sake of argument let's assume by some miracle the Fed can force down rates to where they would not go on their own accord. Would that stimulate anything?

To answer that question let's turn to Japanese Lessons.
“The [Japanese] central bank's implementation of quantitative easing at a time of zero interest rates was similar to a shopkeeper who, unable to sell more than 100 apples a day at Y100 each, tries stocking his shelves with 1,000 apples, and when that has no effect, adds another 1,000. As long as the price remains the same, there is no reason consumer behaviour should change – sales will remain stuck about 100 even if the shopkeeper puts 3,000 apples on display. This is essentially the story of quantitative easing, which not only failed to bring about economic recovery, but also failed to stop asset prices from falling well into 2003.”

- Richard Koo, "The Holy Grail of Macro Economics: Lessons from Japan's Great Recession" (John Wiley 2008).

Richard Koo is particularly good at pointing out that the monetarist Emperor has no clothes. Cutting interest rates to zero in post-bubble Japan had little impact because in a balance sheet recession, when companies are determined to pay down debt to stay alive, they will not borrow at any price.

In Koo‟s words, “Quantitative easing was the twenty-first century's greatest monetary non-event.”

When your investment case essentially rests on nothing more substantial than "greater fool theory" and a somewhat magical process whereby the Treasury issues debt which is immediately bought back by the central bank, it is probably time to look to a less heavily manipulated market.

On the likely impact of quantitative easing in the UK, Richard Koo again:
“At the risk of belabouring the obvious, imagine a patient in the hospital who takes a drug prescribed by her doctor, but does not react as the doctor expected and, more importantly, does not get better. When she reports back to the doctor, he tells her to double the dosage. But this does not help either. So he orders her to take four times, eight times, and finally a hundred times the original dosage. All to no avail. Under these circumstances, any normal human being would come to the conclusion that the doctor's original diagnosis was wrong, and that the patient suffered from a different disease. But today's macroeconomics assumes that private sector firms are maximizing profits at all times, meaning that given a low enough interest rate, they should be willing to borrow money to invest.

In reality, however, borrowers – not lenders, as argued by academic economists – were the primary bottleneck in Japan's Great Recession.”
Krugman might counter that forcing long-term rates down will lower rates on mortgages. It will do no such thing. Mortgage rates long ago disconnected from the 10-year treasury, primarily because of rising default risk. This is why the Fed has a separate facility dealing specifically with mortgage rates.

Given all the Fed and Fed-sponsored lending facilities, the Fed is pretty much the lender of only resort across the board. In this case, if you were a bank would you want to commit to holding a 30 year mortgage when the only reason rates were low was because the Fed manipulated them that low (assuming once again the Fed could do such a thing)?

In Passing the Buck economist Greg Mankiw was the one arguing for quantitative easing while challenging Krugman who argued for deficit spending. This caused a bit of a spat at the time and they have been arguing about many things ever since .

For the record, both are now wrong because quantitative easing did not accomplish a damn thing for Japan nor will it accomplish a damn thing for the US. What it will do however, is distort the economic picture while creating an expense unwinding something that should never have been wound up in the first place.
Moreover, Krugman is doubly wrong because of his Keynesian "hangover theories" as noted in Krugman Still Wrong After All These Years.

At least we have a price tag for this lunch proposal. It's a start. Now all we need is for Krugman to come to the realization that the benefits are negative. After all, $200 billion lunches that provide no benefit are rather expensive indeed.

Krakk! har heller ingen tro på quantitative easing. For den saks skyld tror vi heller ikke på telekinese, grønne menn på mars eller tegn til intelligent liv i sentralbanker og regjeringer rundt om. Hadde så vært, ville vi aldri fått boligbobler av galaktiske proporsjoner og derivater med en sprengkraft som langt overgår allverdens kjernefysiske stridshoder.

På den annen side - når alle går i takt - mot samme mål - må det gå galt!



Keynesianere trives best i flokk...



God grøt!

Buffett