OpenRCE Blog Entry

Halvar Flake (halvar) <halvar

flake

sabre-security

com>

Sunday, October 5 2008 14:33.00 CDT

My brother wrote an article injecting some reality into the discussion about the banking crisis on Spiegel Online. The german version can be seen here. Ill share a short summary of his arguments here (and hell complain about my distortions later ;).

Short version: The article describes why the situation is less dire than many pundits claim, and explains logical fallacies in commonly-heard arguments.

In the following, heres a summary of his arguments, in the form of "Myth --> Reality"

The US government is taking on a total of 7000bn in liabilities -- about 5500bn by agreeing to step in for Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac, and about 700bn in papers bought by doing the bailout. This equates to roughly half of US GDP, and since the US is already in debt by about 65% of GDP, this would push the total indebtedness of the US to be clearly past 100% of GDP. As a result, serious doubts would have to be cast on the US governments ability to repay debts and service interest on debt.
Reality: Most of the 5500bn are backed by "proper" mortgages with decent quality. It is unclear whether the US gov will lose money on the Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac deal at all. Even the 700bn in "toxic assets" the US is willing to buy have some underlying value. Realistic expectations at the total loss for the US government in this deal runs in the area of 500bn, which would be less than 3% of GDP -- and therefore not a significant source of problems.
The liquidity that central banks are injecting into the markets should lead to hyperinflation. Reality: The measures to help liquidity in the markets do not increase the money supply in the long run. They are usually short-term credits given to struggling banks for a limited amount of time -- weeks or months. After this time, the creditors have to repay the loans, and the money disappears. At the same time, the willingness by existing banks to lend decreases, thus decreasing the money supply in the economy. The statistics by central banks show that the actual money supply M2 is growing a lot less slowly at the moment in spite of all the liquidity injections. Since the money supply is only growing very slowly at the moment, the inflationary pressures are low.
The banking crisis is responsible for the overall slowdown in the EUs economy, and the German government is thus not responsible for having to adjust their growth estimates downwards sharply.
Reality: Most indicators show that the slowdown started way before the crisis reached its current urgence. The indicators started pointing down much earlier as a result of the heavy increase in energy costs, the appreciation of the euro (and the resulting loss in competitiveness), and Germanys botched reform of accounting rules for writing down investments in equipment. The banking crisis is just the latest "kick" -- but the three previous ones were all known early (and couldve been partially corrected).
This is the mother of all financial crises. This banking crisis is the worst crisis in several generations, up to the 1930s crash. Reality: Dramatic banking crises are more common than we think. Since 1970, the IWF has counted 42 crashes in countries like Argentina, Indonesia, China, Japan, Finland or Norway. In comparison to these crises, the current crisis isnt even very deep or expensive: The Paulson-bailout comes at a cost of 700bn, not even 5% of GDP, and only a fraction of this will be actually lost. According to the IWF, the average banking crisis in a country came at the cost of 13% of GDP for that countrys tax payer. The Indonesian crisis even came in at four times this. The big difference to the other crises is that this one has caught on in the worlds biggest economy, and as such reaches unknown dimensions in absolute terms.