Obama’s financial reform will fail because all the masters of the universe know how to do is make money.
Wall Street’s Big Fish Stink From The Head Down – Robert Lenzner, Forbes
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A State of Distress, A Time To Repent, Collateral Damage, Coming Social Unrest, Coup d'etat in America, Greenspan is kind of stupid, Insolvency, Let's Call What It Is - DEPRESSION, Our phony middle class, Patience is a virtue...Delusion is a vice, Political Chaos, Ron Paul Stands Tall, Stress Test Mess, Subsidiarity, TARP fruit loops, The Austrian School of Economics, The Consequences of Greed, The Democrats Blew It Again, The Economics of Schumpeter, The End of American Capitalism As We Know It? - Discuss, The excellent adventures of Ben Bernanke, The Financial Elite, The Geithner Resignation Watch, The Inherent Disorder of Empires, The Intrusion of UNLAWFUL Authority, The New American Socialism, Those Quarky Accounting Rules, Unemployment Catastrophe, Unindicted Co-Conspiritors, We Are All Cooked, We Are All Guilty, We Have Become Beggars To The World, Who owns Congress-Still!
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Apr 102010
When asked what advice he would give to residents of Ashtabula County Ohio because of cutbacks in official law enforcement budgets, Judge Alfred Mackey said they should:
“arm themselves. Be very careful, be vigilant, get in touch with your neighbors, because we’re going to have to look after each other.”
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2010/04/ohio-judge-tells-residents-to-arm.html
In Mark-to-Make Believe, Satyajit Das explores some of the issues with mark-to-market accounting and notes that “if accounting is a mechanism for communicating financial information, then in the global financial crisis, MTM accounting has been a means for mis-communication.”
MtM and fair value accounting allowed banks to maximize short term returns by recognising profits up-front. Longer term risks of illiquid assets were hidden by the process. When the hidden risks emerged, central banks and regulators were left to solve the problems using public funds. If accounting is a mechanism for communicating financial information, then in the global financial crisis, MtM accounting has been a means for mis-communication.
In a speech in September 2008 to the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland, Sir David Tweedie, head of the IASB, spoke of accountants with “all the backbone of a chocolate éclair.” He spoke of an era of “creeping crumble” when “… auditors [were picked off] by investment bankers, selling a scheme that perhaps was just within the law to a client, persuading two major auditing firms to accept it whereupon it became accepted practice and QCs would tell a third auditor that he could not qualify [the company's financial report] as the scheme was now part of ‘true and fair’.”
Sir David’s outlined his vision of the role: “The accountant is an artist, but he has to portray his subject faithfully…..If the reporting accountant lacks integrity; if raw economic facts are unpalatable and smoothing devices are sought; if he fails to support fellow professionals who have carefully documented their view of the principle, researched the literature and sought advice and made an honest judgment; if regulators demand one answer and one alone, not those within a range; or if the profession constantly seeks answers for all questions – the reporting accountant will paint by numbers and deserve the rule-based standards he has requested. This will be the profession of the search engine, not one of reasoned judgment.”
George Clemenceau, the former French Prime Minister, once noted that: “La guerre! C’est une chose trop grave pour la confier à des militaires.[War is too important a matter to be left to the military.]” Accounting may be simply too important to be left to accountants.
Jun 182009
Last week was a milestone for US treasury secretary Tim Geithner. He finally got to play the hero. The morning of June 9, Treasury notified 10 financial institutions, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, US Bancorp, and Capital One Financial, that they were “eligible to complete the repayment process” for the capital they received under the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). In other words, they would be allowed to pay back $68.3 billion. Even though they really owe $229.7 billion. That we know of. But Geithner didn’t mention that last bit. Instead, he professed that “these repayments are an encouraging sign of financial repair,” with the caveat that “we still have work to do.”
The “we” he refers to is himself and Wall Street, both of whom are getting a good deal out of this fractional payback scheme. The agreement frees the banks from restrictions on executive pay or, worse, their general practices, but it still allows them to keep the cash they’ve received through non-TARP venues like the FDIC Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program— or the massive sums the banks recovered from AIG (thanks to its own federal bailout) to cover their losses on credit derivatives. Not to mention any cash provided by the mother of all cheap loan programs—the Federal Reserve.
Geithner, for his part, gets to convey the message that things are looking up. “These repayments follow a period in which many banks have successfully raised equity capital from private investors,” stated the press release. “Also, for the first time in many months, these banks have issued long-term debt that is not guaranteed by the government.”
Well, of course certain banks have raised some money on their own: Firms have a tendency to look a whole lot better when they’re backed by government capital and have cheap federal loans sitting on their books. Private investors notice that sort of thing. But more troubling than the misplaced praise is the fine print that accompanied the announcement: “These repayments,” the department noted, “help to reduce Treasury’s borrowing and national debt. The repayments also increase Treasury’s cushion to respond to any future financial instability that might otherwise jeopardize economic recovery.”
This statement belies some accounting sleight of hand.
The Big Bank Bailout Payback Bamboozle – Nomi Pins, Mother Jones
May 142009
Stanford Law Review has a great interview with Warren Buffett’s longstanding partner, Charlie Munger. Munger offers much less corn pone and more direct opinion than Buffett does.
The entire piece is very much worth reading, but I wanted to hone in on some key topics. One is the neglect of the role of what amounts to accounting fraud in this mess. Much of this is technically not fraud under the current regime but would be if the standards of 20 years ago were still in place. We now live in a world where everyone knows that the authorities simply will not take down any of the Big Four. Four is now deemed to be the minimum number of big accounting firms permissible. So we de facto have accounting firms “too big to fail”, which means “too big to be asked to eat much liability, not matter how indefensible their conduct.” So if they do something bad, they might have to fire a few partners and pay a moderate fine.
So effectively, we live in a world that echoes the Nixon Presidency. If the Big Four does it, it must be legal.
From the Stanford Law Review (hat tip reader Hubert):
As we look at the current situation, how much of the responsibility would you lay at the feet of the accounting profession?
I would argue that a majority of the horrors we face would not have happened if the accounting profession developed and enforced better accounting. They are way too liberal in providing the kind of accounting the financial promoters want. They’ve sold out, and they do not even realize that they’ve sold out.
Would you give an example of a particular accounting practice you find problematic?
Take derivative trading with mark-to-market accounting, which degenerates into mark-to-model. Two firms make a big derivative trade and the accountants on both sides show a large profit from the same trade.
And they can’t both be right. But both of them are following the rules.
Yes, and nobody is even bothered by the folly. It violates the most elemental principles of common sense. And the reasons they do it are: (1) there’s a demand for it from the financial promoters, (2) fixing the system is hard work, and (3) they are afraid that a sensible fix might create new responsibilities that cause new litigation risks for accountants….
Very few people realize how much we’ve screwed up. Even in leading law schools and business schools very few people realize that the mess at Enron never could have happened if accounting customs hadn’t been changed. What we have now is a bigger, more widespread Enron.
Munger also has some interesting observations about the decay in values:
Read the entire article at Naked Capitalism: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/05/munger-on-phony-accounting-cultural.html
So the accounting rules say that a decline in the market value of a bank’s debt thanks to increased credit default swap spreads — that is, because investors think you’re more likely to fail — counts as a a profit. On the other hand, if your bank looks stronger, the spreads fall, and you book a loss.
FT Alphaville has the story. Citigroup reported
A net $2.5 billion positive CVA on derivative positions, excluding monolines, mainly due to the widening of Citi’s CDS spreads
while Morgan Stanley reported
Morgan Stanley would have been profitable this quarter if not for the dramatic improvement in our credit spreads – which is a significant positive development, but had a near-term negative impact on our revenues.
So Citigroup is profitable because investors think it’s failing, while Morgan Stanley is losing money because investors think it will survive. I am not making this up.
The Committee to Defraud the World
To say now that ‘No one knew’ or ‘I was mistaken’ or ‘I was just doing as I was told’ is another in a series of lies and deceptions that have supported one of the greatest frauds in the history of the world.
But this is not history. This episode of fraud is still playing itself out now. And to fail to understand the depth and breadth of this madness is to place oneself in peril, and in the power of those who are twisting the Western economic and political system even now to satisfy their lust for wealth and power. You are only successful if you can keep what you kill.
Glass-Steagall fell after a decade long campaign involving hundreds of millions in lobbyist money spread lavishly around the Congress, led by Sanford Weil of Citibank, supported by key banking and political figures in the Congress and at the Fed. It involved Senator Phil Gramm, who helped to put a stake in the heart of the financial regulatory process under the Reagan free markets banner, and who recently said the problem is that the middle class were a bunch of whiners. As did his wife Wendy, who as the chairperson of the CFTC had exempted Enron from regulatory oversight, and then left to take a position there on its board of directors.
Like the Mortgage Backed Securities scandal it involved surprisingly few principal players, like Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin, who used their power and influence to silence and ostracize critics, and promote a climate of reckless disregard for the public trust under the meme of ‘efficient markets’ and deregulation. This might have been an innocent policy error if it did not involve premeditated theft on a massive scale, followed by cover ups, denials, and a control fraud that exists even today.
But it also involved literally thousands of collaborators and enablers, from mainstream media people, economists, analysts, and other thought leaders to politicians and regulators who saw that it was to their advantage to at least passively support this scheme which they knew very well was a fairy tale, a fraud, class warfare by a new name, but were able to hide their own guilty consciences behind self-serving rationalization and the shield of plausible deniability.
History, and hopefully the justice system, will sort this all out. It is difficult, even now, to get one’s mind around the enormity of it. This is its most powerful weapon. Who could be such monsters, so amoral, so destructively sociopathic? Future generations will regard it as an episode of madness, driven by a few people in a tight circle of self-reinforcing thought, people with remarkably similar cultural and educational backgrounds, driven by a consuming lust for power, that were able to dupe and delude an entire nation made vulnerable by propaganda, a co-opted press, and apathy.
In the meanwhile all the great mass of people can do is to watch, and wait, and seek to protect themselves from these ravening wolves grown increasingly desperate, as their arrogance comes to a tragic fall. They can vote out incumbents, but the parties choose the candidates, and too often they resemble competing crime families of special interests more than pillars of a representative government, saying one thing to get elected and doing another thing once in office.
This is the approach of trouble when hubris is at its height, and the few feel they have everything to gain and nothing to lose, if only they can gain more power, and necessarily become more ruthless. They are trapped in a cycle of fear and greed. The fear provokes the lies and the cover ups, but the greed promotes the extension of the fraud and the theft, requiring even more lies and cover ups. The operative word is ‘over reach,’ in a classic late stage Ponzi scheme. This will undoubtedly add to the confusion as the truth is assaulted by the big lie.
The last vestiges of polite society are often shed as the downfall reaches it final conclusion, at the end, when all is revealed, at last. And so there will be great danger.
Jesse’ s Cafe http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2010/07/committee-to-defraud-world.html